Gate of Flesh

One of my favorite directors, as mentioned somewhere previously, is Seijun Suzuki. I appreciate that he did whatever he wanted with the studio's money, and made some genuinely ambitious and visually interesting movies on a shoestring budget. I also am fond of movies that make no sense in an intriguing manner, so there's also that. Then naturally I would be rather excited about Gate of Flesh showing up at my door.

Post-war Japan was apparently a bit of a hell hole, at least if this is anything to go by. Here, we have a story about a woman named Maya - Yumiko Nogawa - who falls in with a group of prostitutes. Kayo Matsuo as Omino, Satoko Kasai as Sen, and Tamiko Ishii as Oroku welcome young Maya into prostitute club, where the only rule is to not talk about prostitute club not give away the goods for free, under punishment of severe beatings. Unfortunately, one day a stranger with utterly ridiculous cheeks, cheeks so bad they almost the movies he's in because he looks like a chipmunk with the measels and it's really distracting, arrives on their doorstep, Shintaro Ibuki as portrayed by the cheeky Jo Shishido. He had cheek injections to get that look, what's wrong with him? Apparently Japanese ladies have a thing for impossibly big cheeked men, and it slowly divides the house.

At the beginning of the film, it seems almost feminist. Yeah, they're all whores, but they work for themselves, and they're doing it by exploiting the base instincts of the surrounding men. They're the ones in control in the scenes, and they seem to wield more power than anyone else. That vaguely feminist thing comes crashing down as soon as Ibuki arrives, since he immediately becomes the most powerful character by promptly beating up one of the ladies when she tries to beat him. It's an interesting slant while it lasts, however, since the movie was also designed to tie up naked ladies and whip them, in order to titillate the movie goer - or at least that is what is claimed in the special features.

Feminist or not, the film is as a whole unrelentingly grim. Everyone who shows a trace of human compassion or caring is immediately whipped, beat, shot or raped. This list includes a kindly priest getting raped by the leading lady. The message seems to be that people in post war Japan only survived by being the worst people possible, and that was the only way to survive. I wasn't there, so maybe it's true, but it's still quite dark.

Unfortunately, this features less of the visual invention that Suzuki is famous for, and it stars my least favorite actor of all time - seriously I can barely look at him and his freakish cheeks, it's like he lives in the uncanny valley. It's a fascinatingly dark movie, the perspective of a losing country immediately post war, when they're still struggling to admit defeat and rebuild. It's grim, but let's be honest Japan, you did pretty well for yourselves in the years since. Besides, if memory serves, you were kind of dicks anyway.

Kanto Warrior

Let me introduce you to Seijun Suzuki.

Once upon a time, in Japan, there was a film studio called Nikkatsu. It treated film like a production line, taking well worn stories, giving them to a lineup of directors with a short time frame to film and a small budget. One of these directors was Seijun Suzuki, who was making B-movies. Suzuki soon realized that, since he wasn't the main draw, he could do whatever he wanted and nobody would notice. His films got steadily weirder, as he generally mucked about on company time, ignoring scripts and getting all silly with the camera and editing. He figured that by staying under budget and on time, he could do whatever he wanted. Eventually, the bosses at Nikkatsu caught on, and fired him after he made Branded to Kill, for making "movies that didn't make any sense and didn't make any money."

To be fair, they had a point.

Let's be honest, as someone who loves inventive visuals and can get behind movies that don't make any sense, I like Suzuki. Whatever one thinks of the stories of his movies, they look cool, and they do a lot with a very obviously limited budget. He's one of those directors who sees the screen as a toy, something he can use to make whatever he wants. As such, he'll often do tricks with light, unconventional framing, or in his best party trick, use the limitations of his set to make some sort of strange artistic point, such as having the walls collapse and having the outside be solid red.

Truth be told, it's important that he gets clever with his filming, and often ignores his scripts, because he's not really given great material. Take Kanto Wanderer, today's random movie. The story doesn't really have an overarching plot, just an assortment of subplots colliding in a fiery car crash. The star is Akira Kobayashi, and he's a Yakuza, or Japanese gangster. He also wears absurd eyebrows for some reason, though this isn't as bad as the bizarre chipmunk cheeks of the star of Branded to Kill. He's really the only link between the assortment of storylines, which all haphazardly combine in the end. There's really no overarching plot here, just a bunch of things that happen.

If any other director approached this film, it would just be a forgettable b-movie from the 60s. In a way, it still is, but there are glimmers of clever film making. Suzuki plays merrily with light and shadow, and some scenes are more notable for the clever lighting used than what is happening. There are also some scenes which serve to make some sort of thematic point, purely by the way they're shot. There are school girls that are shot in an idyllic, dream-like manner, but only when they're alone. Otherwise, it's a gritty world, to suggest some sort of point about innocence.

As Suzuki goes, while this has elements of his style, it's really not quite special enough to be considered one of his best works. However, you've got to appreciate just how much he plays with the format, and how much better it makes this movie as a result. It's not great, but without the adventures in lighting, it would have been terrible. You can see on many frames there's real creativity there. It's a film by a director slowly finding his voice and his eyes, and there are snippets of clever in the middle of a fairly standard film. It's not as amazing as what killed his career, but it is a glimpse into a developing style.