Tag: 1990s

Scorpion: Double Venom 2 (サソリ 殺す天使, Ryoji Niimura, 1998)

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Some years after the conclusion of Scorpion Double Venom, Nami (Chiharu Komatsu) is still on the run. Now apparently using the name Sayuri, that of the surrogate sister she again failed to save in the previous film, she’s been working as a dancer in a club while continuing to look for the one-armed man she believes killed her younger sister. Spotting a one-armed gang boss on TV, she becomes convinced that Goda is the man she’s looking for and becomes a cabaret hostess to get close to him. But before she can pull the trigger, Goda is gunned down by a man in a police uniform who turns out to be a hitman hired by a local gang. 

This leaves Scorpion: Double Venom with a problem because Nami no longer has a clear target for her revenge and therefore no reason to live. She takes the gun used to kill Goda and at one point tries to use it to kill herself but is saved by Eiji (Ryo Karato), the hitman she rescued from the scene of the crime. Eiji’s mission of vengeance is however not yet over. Hoping to escape the gangland life, he robbed a bank with his girlfriend Ichiko (Aya Sasaki), but when she got shot in the leg, he ran off with the money and left her there. Nami then becomes determined to rescue Ichiko instead, making use of her old boyfriend, who has since married someone else, to get her a job as the prison doctor.

This is another break with the pattern, as Nami is not a woman in prison but undercover among the corrupt authorities who are in league with the rival yakuza gang to buy cheap drugs to use on the inmates while forcing released prisoners to deal for them. Forced into a straitjacket and sedated, Ichiko is repeatedly raped by the warden’s henchman. A female guard then takes her own life because she can no longer bear to listen to Ichiko’s screams, only the prison get a backstreets doctor to falsify the death certificate to eliminate evidence they’d been drugging her too and make it look like she died in an accident. 

Sucked into a yakuza gang war, Nami is constrained by the darkness of the world around her and once again uses her medical skills for the purposes of revenge. The irony of her using a scalpel to kill is not lost on anyone, though this time she does also use healing abilities to nurse Eiji back to health which might explain the Japanese title “Killing Angel” even if there’s a serious plot hole along given some vague sci-fi style justifications in the film’s closing moments as Nami finally learns some unwelcome information about her sister’s death. In a way, the ending the brings the cycle full circle as Nami is one again betrayed by a man she had trusted and bonded with in a shared desire for justice and liberation.

In essence, they’re all trying to escape the prison of the wider society but as Nami discovers, society is not exactly tolerant of fugitives from order and the implications of the ambiguous ending are fairly bleak. It seems that once again, Nami has been denied her vengeance and granted only a cruel irony that suggests there can be no escape or starting over for those like Nami nor can there be closure for the traumatic past. While trying to rescue Ichiko, she’d encountered one of her former cellmates who had become a turncoat, taking the place of the guard who had killed themselves to facilitate Ichiko’s perpetual rapes. She at first refuses to help Nami because her parole is coming up, but then changes her mind, takes a shot at her own vengeful protest and pays a heavy price for it. 

Moving away from the exploitation roots of the franchise, Niimura takes the sequel in an artier direction with its love scene montage and melancholy blue-tinged colour palette while scaling back a little on the action preferring to focus on Nami’s non-romance with Eiji until her daring attempt to break Ichiko out of prison. But as has become abundantly clear, no one is able to escape from the prison of contemporary Japan and least of all Nami who remains trapped by her desire for vengeance and perhaps a willing victim of it.

Scorpion: Double Venom (サソリ・女囚701号, Ryoji Niimura, 1998)

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Scripted by Sasori in USA’s Daisuke Goto, Scorpion: Double Venom (サソリ・女囚701号, Sasori: Joshuu 701-go) brings Nami back to Japan but with an all new backstory and motivation for revenge. In the films up to this point, Nami is betrayed by a man she loves and thereafter seeks a revenge that becomes progressively less personal, striking out against entrenched patriarchy and societal misogyny. This time, however, she’s to avenge the death of a girl she couldn’t save, her sister, Yumi, who was kidnapped and murdered as a child.

Like that of Sasori in the USA, this Nami (Chiharu Komatsu) is a highly educated woman, in fact a doctor. Immediately recognising a patient as the man responsible for abducting her sister all those years ago she is left with a dilemma. She confronts him and he laughs at her. As it turns out, the statute of limitations on his crime ran out the day before, so Nami’s plan to turn him in to the police is rendered a no go. As he continues to taunt her and makes suggestive comments about the little girl inexplicably in the next bed sharing a ward with an adult man, Nami ends up stabbing him to death with her scalpel but just before he dies, he tells her that he didn’t kill her sister after all. It was his accomplice, a one-armed man!

Nevertheless, Nami’s revenge will be delayed because she’s quickly carted off to prison for 10 years of hard labour. Unlike those in the other films, this prison is mainly run by women but the warden is a predatory lesbian who extracts sexual favours from the inmates with the vague promise of early parole and claims that this place is like heaven if you play by the rules. After getting sent to solitary for fighting, Nami befriends another woman, Sayuri (Miho Kiuchi), who reminds her of her younger sister, and discovers that she is shortly to be executed at the gallows hidden in the deepest recesses of the prison. Sayuri is apparently not guilty of the crime for which she is serving her sentence but was talked into taking the fall for a sleazy politician who murdered her friend so that her older sister’s medical bills would be covered. Her death sentence is for accidentally killing a guard during a previous escape attempt. All her subsequent attempts to escape have been so that she could see her sister one last time before she dies.

The theme this time is then sisterhood as the two women fill in the missing half for the other and bond in their shared misuse at the hands of the justice system. Nami becomes determined to save Sayuri in the way she couldn’t save Yumi, but her struggle eventually takes on a larger dimension in keeping with those of the previous films as she tries to get revenge for Sayuri too after discovering that her death sentence was partly handed down by the murderous politician trying to tidy up loose ends as he plans career advancement with the aid of his entire amoral aide, Naruse (Tomorowo Taguchi). Escaping from the prison, she literally and symbolically frees all of the women who then take their own revenge on the sadistic warden.

For all of its seriousness, the film does have its faintly ridiculous qualities such as Nami’s use of electrical wiring as a defibrillator that allows her to resuscitate Sayuri after she’s hanged by the warden at the politician’s instigation. She later uses these same wires ripped from the wall to electrocute the warden’s bruiser male guard though it’s Sayuri who hot wires the prison van so they can escape. Eventually, she’s hunted down by a man with a crossbow and in a nod to the original trilogy, stabs him in the eye. Still, with her own revenge still in progress, Nami effectively avenges all her sisters while fighting for justice. Tracking down the videotape Sayuri had hidden proving the politician’s guilt, she eventually exposes him along with all his corruption bringing down the complex network that had extended out into the prison and trapped so many other women. Now a fugitive, Nami chases the one-armed man and has once again become an avenger of women bringing justice to those failed by an inherently corrupt and misogynistic justice system.

Sasori in U.S.A. (Daisuke Goto, 1997)

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An attempt to reboot the Female Prisoner Scorpion series for V-cinema had stalled in the early ‘90s when the then star of Death Threat abruptly pulled out of a sequel that was to be a production with Hong Kong’s Golden Harvest. In 1997, however, Nami Matsushima was once again resurrected only this time as a US co-production with most of the film shot in Los Angeles and in a mix of Japanese and English. 

Relocating the franchise overseas is in some ways surprising given that the first film of the original series opened with the national anthem and shots of the Japanese flag. It was explicitly clear that they were talking primarily about the social conditions of Japan in the 1970s. Likewise, Sasori in U.S.A. seems to walk back on some of the themes of patriarchal oppression that informed the previous instalments preferring instead to refocus on themes such as racism, the failure of the American Dream, and the powerlessness of living under a cruel and arbitrary foreign power, which is an entirely contrary perspective to the earlier film’s attempts at critiquing corruption with Japan itself. 

It’s never really made clear why Jiro (Tetta Sugimoto) and Nami (Yoko Saito) are in the US in the first place, though Nami’s sympathetic journalist friend implies that Jiro came there to make his fortune only to become frustrated with the limits of the American Dream. This Nami is a well-paid interior designer, at least according to her prison file, if one completely in thrall to Jiro whom she met in the US an unspecified amount of time previously. When Jiro is killed by a car bomb, Nami ends up being arrested for his murder because she stood to gain 1.2 million dollars by his death (though they appeared to have a very comfortable life to begin with, so it’s not clear why she’d take such drastic action). Apparently too traumatised to defend herself, Nami failed to hire a proper lawyer or fight her case and has not launched an appeal but spends all her time vowing revenge, which of course means she has to escape from prison. 

That might be a minor problem for the film, which is to some extent in its marketing selling itself as a women in prison picture. This is indeed the most exploitative of the films so far with a salacious shower scene and titivating moments of touching and kissing each other, while Nami is also harassed by an obnoxious blonde prisoner who seems to be running the cell block while in cahoots with the sadistic warden who, as this is America, is incredibly religious and forever quoting from the Bible while raping his inmates. Nami eventually stabs him in the eye in what may be an homage to the original series. 

Nevertheless, Nami soon escapes in the company of another prisoner who is second generation Japanese-American and has been blind since birth. Like Nami, Yukiko (Shizuka Ochi) also has a mission of revenge against the American hoodlums who raped her and shot her Dominican boyfriend Dino to death. Though the narrative actually has almost nothing to do with Female Prisoner Scorpion, the twist will be very obvious to anyone familiar with the series as Nami has indeed been betrayed by a man she thought loved her. Discovering Jiro may have been embezzling money and in fact knocking off the lawyers who tried to sue the car company he worked for for making defective cars rather than being knocked off by them, Nami is forced to reckon with the illusionary quality of her American success story. Jiro meanwhile rails about entrenched racism and unfairness, decrying the police and justice system as “insane” which they well might be or at least in their treatment of Nami. Broken by the failure of his American Dream, he becomes a pitiful and tragic figure.

Even so, Nami’s revenge remains a personal affair rather than an all out attack on a corrupt and oppressive social order ruled by misogyny and male failure. Though the production values are perhaps a little higher than one might expect and the direction leaning towards the artier side with its blue-tinted eroticism, shower scenes aside, the film remains very much of its time and has very little in common with the Female Prisoner Scorpion franchise save its women in prison elements and a late allusion to an actual scorpion. It is though interesting for its perspective on the American Dream and America in general as a place of greed, violence, and intensely hypocritical religious fanaticism. 

Minbo, or the Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion (ミンボーの女, Juzo Itami, 1992)

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“Yakuza are vain, treat them politely,” the heroine of Juzo Itami’s 1992 comedy Minbo, or The Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion (ミンボーの女, Minbo no Onna) instructs a hapless pair of hotel employees trying to solve the organised crime problem at their hotel, but it’s a lesson Itami would go on to learn himself after he was attacked by gangsters who slashed his face and neck with knives. Itami in fact died in fairly suspicious circumstances in 1997 having fallen from the roof of a high-rise building leaving a note behind him explaining his “suicide” was intended to prove his innocence in regards to an upcoming newspaper story alleging an affair with a young actress. Given Itami’s films had often made a point of skewering Japanese traditions and that taking one’s own life is not the way most would choose to clear their name, it has long been suggested that his death was staged by yakuza who’d continued to harass him ever since the film’s release. 

It’s true enough that Minbo may have touched a nerve in undercutting the yakuza’s preferred image of themselves as the inheritors of samurai valour standing up for the oppressed masses against a cruel authority. Of course, that isn’t really how it works and getting the yakuza on your side in a civil dispute may be a case of out of the frying pan into the fire. It’s the yakuza themselves who are the oppressive authority ruling by fear and intimidation. Even so, the yakuza as an institution were in a moment of flux in the early ‘90s following the collapse of the bubble economy during which they’d shifted further away from the street thuggery of the post-war era into a newly corporatised if no more respectable occupation. This change is perhaps exemplified by “minbo”, a kind of fraud in which gangsters get involved in civil disputes underpinned with the thinly veiled threat of violence. 

The yakuza who plague the Hotel Europa, for example, pull petty tricks such as “discovering” a cooked cockroach in the middle of a lasagne, or claiming to have left a bag of cash behind which is later handed back to the “wrong” person by the front desk who probably should have asked for ID. Itami frames the presence of the yakuza as a kind of infestation, suggesting that if you do not tackle it right away it soon takes over and cannot be removed. Dealing with the problem directly may cause it to get worse in the short term, but only by doing so can you ever be rid of them once and for all. At least that’s the advice given by forthright attorney Mahiru (Nobuko Miyamoto) who demonstrated that the only way to deal with yakuza is to show them that you aren’t afraid because at the end of the day the law is on your side. 

Part of the “woman” cycle in which Itami’s wife Nobuko Miyamoto stars as a sometimes eccentric yet infinitely capable woman solving the problems of contemporary Japan through old-fashioned earnestness and everyday decency, Minbo finds its fearless heroine explaining that the yakuza themselves are a kind of con. In general they won’t hurt civilians because then they’re much more likely to be arrested. Going to prison is incredibly expensive and therefore not likely to prove cost effective. She knows that if she can catch them admitting they’ve committed a “crime” then they can’t touch her, and they won’t. They do however go after the rather more naive hotel boss Kobayashi (Akira Takarada) whom they try to frame for the rape of a bar hostess, drugging him after he unwisely agreed to meet them alone to hand over blackmail money. Then again, the hotel isn’t entirely whiter than white either. Kobayashi admits they can’t pull strings with the health ministry over the cockroach incident because they previously used them to cover up a previous instance of food poisoning. 

In any case, the yakuza end up looking very grubby indeed. It’s hard to call yourself a defender of the oppressed when you’re pulling petty stunts no better than a backstreet chancer. Yet like any kind of irritating insect, they too begin to evolve gradually developing a kind of immunity to Mahiru’s tactics in themselves manipulating law only they aren’t as good as she is and they are after all in the wrong. She’s a little a wrong too in that if pushed too far the yakuza will indeed stoop to physical violence against civilians, but she also knows that they thrive on fear and that to beat them she may have to put her safety on the line to prove they have no power over her. It seems Itami felt something similar issuing a statement shortly after his attack to the effect that “Yakuza must not be allowed to deprive us of our freedom through violence and intimidation, and this is the message of my movie”. As gently humorous as any of Itami’s movies and no less earnest, Minbo paints the yakuza as a plague on post-bubble Japan and suggests that it’s about time they were shown the door. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

Nang Nak (นางนาก, Nonzee Nimibutr, 1999)

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Mae Nak Phra Khanong is one of Thailand’s best known and most enduring ghost stories, though Nonzee Nimibutr’s 1999 adaptation Nang Nak (นางนาก) scales back a little on the inherent terror of the folktale, preferring to focus on the romantic tragedy of a loving couple separated by death. You could then read it as a tale of grief, that the husband returning from war cannot accept his wife is dead, rather than the reverse that the wife’s love and devotion is so strong that it overcomes death itself and becomes something that is in that way terrifying.

It does seem, however, that in this instance the ghost is real and it is vengeful. The wronged wife Nak (Inthira Charoenpura) takes revenge on those who betrayed her from the midwife who stole her wedding ring to a local man who tried to tell her husband, Mak (Winai Kraibutr), that his wife was actually dead. Though the framing of the tale may seem in its way uncomfortably sexist despite its romantic overtones, it’s clear that Nak suffered largely because of the male failure around her. Her husband was conscripted for a war which was really nothing to do with him leaving her, pregnant, to manage their farm alone. The implied cause of the miscarriage which leads to her death in childbirth is overwork and she appears to have received no help from the other villagers with many men apparently remaining in the village. When questioned by Mak, she tells him that the other villagers shunned her and called her an adulteress, disputing the parentage of her child with her husband already away at the war. 

But the film does not particularly blame war for Nak’s fate, seemingly accepting it as a necessary duty Mak had to further the cause of his nation which is placed above that he owes to his wife and unborn child. In fact, the ghost issue is later solved only by the intervention of a powerful Buddhist monk, Somdet, which implies that this supranational structure is necessary for maintaining order and that the village is otherwise unable to govern itself. Likewise, it paints Buddhism as a modern religion and essential means of national unity that is inherently superior to the backward superstitions of the villagers who decide to call in a shaman against the advice of the local monk. The shaman turns out to be next to useless and in fact makes things worse until Somdet can arrive and is able to talk peacefully to Nak and convince her that she needs to accept her death and move on to the next cycle of life.

It’s also Somdet who heals Mak of his otherwise fatal war wound and the intercutting of his fight for life with Nak’s during the violence of childbirth suggests that her life is somehow sacrificed for his further emphasising the depth and devotion of her love for him. When his health is recovered, Somdet recommends that Mak become a monk in order to clear out his bad karma but Mak declines explaining that he has a duty to his wife and child in his village and so must return to them. In this way, they become a kind of barrier to his spiritual destiny and emblematic of the attachments he should learn to cast off in order to avoid suffering. Like Nak, Mak’s own devotion extends beyond the grave for he does indeed become a monk and never remarries, keeping the promise to be reincarnated as Nak’s husband in a subsequent life.

The local priest had told Nak that scaring monks is a sin, which is odd in a way that it’s somehow worse to scare these spiritually powerful beings than the ordinary villagers. Nevertheless Nonzee Nimibutr gives her the somewhat familiar attributes of a Thai ghost, allowing her to hang from the ceiling with her hair flowing down while she stares at the monks with bloodshot eyes and a pale face. She is able to enchant Mak so that he does not notice the dilapidation of their home or that all their food is rotten even if he later becomes suspicious of the large number of rats around. Primarily she seems to use natural creatures to enact her revenge with the midwife’s corpse torn apart by lizards, though Mak too has terrifying nightmares of his friend dying in his arms and then melting away with quite sickening effects. Even so, it seems Nonzee Nimibutr is keener to emphasise the romantic tragedy and primacy of Buddhist thought rather than ghostly horror while making it clear that death, along with grief and loss, is something that must be accepted so the spiritual order may be maintained and with it order in the mortal realm.

Trailer (no dialogue)

Moonlight Whispers (月光の囁き, Akihiko Shiota, 1999)

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Well established in Japanese cinema, the teenage romance comes with its own series of genre tropes, the barriers standing between the young lovers usually leaning towards the constraints of a conformist society, class differences, or familial disapproval if not introducing a note of inevitable tragedy in serious illness or physical threat. What the youngsters typically do not do or are actively at times prevented from doing is to begin to accept themselves for all they know that to do so may in a sense result in their exile from mainstream society. Yet this is exactly the conclusion with which Akihito Shiota’s debut feature Moonlight Whispers (月光の囁き, Gekko no Sasayaki), adapted from the manga by Masahiko Kikuni, eventually presents us as the teens come to embrace their unconventional relationship while accepting that others may never truly understand. 

Beginning in conventionality, Shiota opens with the sweet and innocent friendship between kendo enthusiasts Takuya (Kenji Mizuhashi) and Satsuki (Tsugumi). Many seem to think they are a couple, but Takuya is quick to correct his friend telling him that they are merely “sparring partners” even going so far as to hand over a love letter, which he knows to be exactly the same as the letter his friend writes to all the other girls, on his behalf. As expected, Satsuki finds his behaviour insensitive, suspecting that Takuya himself has a crush on her but finally confessing her own feelings while he wheedles that he never said anything because of his sense of inadequacy explaining that just to be near her was always enough for him. Following this brief moment of connection, the couple embark on a “normal” teen romance, Satsuki taking the initiative with Takuya in bed with a cold to consummate their relationship. It does not go particularly well, in part because Takuya has a secret. He’s been secretly stalking Satsuki for ages, likes to break into her locker to smell her gym kit, and has a collection of keepsakes he’s stolen from her in addition to a series of illicit photographs and a tape of her using his family bathroom. The tape proves the last straw for Satsuki who then storms out calling him a freak and starts dating her handsome kendo club senior Uematsu (Kota Kusano) instead. 

What Satsuki hasn’t figured out is that Takuya quite likes it when she’s mean to him, which is why he continues stalking her even after she starts dating the very “normal” Uematsu. Unexpectedly, she begins to discover that she quite likes, if not quite the process of hurting him, then watching him suffer which is why she makes him sit silently in a tiny cupboard while she has “normal” sex with Uematsu on a sofa directly opposite. The relationship between them is one of push and pull, Takuya initially embarrassed and ashamed of his masochistic desires explaining that “god made me wrong” while ironically driving Satsuki towards an awareness of her sadism. On the other hand, the relationship had always been unconventional in its reversal of gender roles, Satsuki quite literally leading while Takuya trails behind. She is the first to openly state her feelings and the first to initiate sex, while Takuya is somewhat feminised in his deference and timidity.

Nevertheless, Satsuki struggles to accept her capacity for sadism refusing to tell Uematsu why she broke up with Takuya but explaining that she wants a “normal” relationship in with someone with whom she would be able to discuss anything and everything honestly the irony being that she might have had that with Takuya but cannot with Uematsu because she is filled with internalised shame about the “perverted” pleasure she gains on witnessing Takuya wilfully degrade himself on her behalf. They are already in an accidental sado-masochistic relationship though they of course do not quite have the words to describe how they feel or what it is that exists between them. Their love inevitably heads to quite a dark place but even so leads to a kind of rebirth in which each fully accepts themselves for who they are along with their designated role within the relationship even if also knowing that others may not be quite so understanding. 

For all of its provocative qualities, there is an underlying sweetness in Shiota’s unconventional romance even as he carefully inverts accepted genre norms the conventional indie background score perhaps ironically undercutting any sense that the relationship is actually as “perverse” as the teens sometimes feel it is even as they each struggle with their respective feelings and desires. Nevertheless he ends on a note of anxious ambivalence as the physically and emotionally wounded lovers remove themselves from mainstream society in order to embrace their authentic selves.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Helpless (ヘルプレス, Shinji Aoyama, 1996)

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A title card close to the beginning of Shinji Aoyama’s debut film Helpless (ヘルプレス) lets us know that this drama which spans a single day takes place on Sept. 10, 1989. It is indeed late summer for most of the protagonists, refugees from the Showa era living on borrowed time in Heisei and intensely resentful towards the contemporary society which appears to have no place for them while the glamour of the Bubble economy does not appear to have trickled down to their peaceful provincial existence. 

Yakuza, for example, are very much associated with the post-war past and one-armed foot soldier Yasuo (Ken Mitsuishi) is an old-school street thug who can’t accept that his former boss literally is as dead as the institution itself. He’s met at a train station by two former associates, but it’s clear the older at least is awkward around him finally telling Yasuo not to call “too often”. “It’s nice to be normal,” Yasuo sneers, realising his former comrade has gone straight and lives an ordinary life as a regular businessman which is why he really wants nothing to do with his yakuza past. Yasuo takes his as more than just a personal betrayal and shoots him dead with his own gun.

He is quite literally helpless, there’s no place for him in the contemporary society and his only hope is killing his old boss, who is already dead, so he can go back to prison. The only sticking point his younger sister Yuri (Kaori Tsuji) who has learning difficulties and had been living in residential care. Another of Yasuo’s former associates now longer a yakuza, Kenji (Tadanobu Asano), is similarly caring for his father who is in hospital for serious medical treatment. Kenji’s father hums the Internationale to himself and seems to have been consumed by the failure of his personal revolution muttering about blast furnaces while at home Kenji looks out on the now rusty aspirations of another “new era” in a moribund steel plant. He lies to his father that he has a received a job offer from there. 

The two men seem destined to collide, Kenji’s numbed resignation and Yasuo’s irrational rage, though it’s Kenji who later snaps after learning that his father has hanged himself while he was busy taking care of Yasuo’s sister. Even an old classmate he runs into is filled with resentment, talking about taking his “revenge” at the class reunion by poisoning the punch. He says he “forgives” Kenji because he once helped him find his PE kit, though Kenji claims he did it mostly for selfish reasons.The chef at the roadside diner where they wait for Yasuo also seems to be henpecked by his wife who calls him “weaker than a woman.” Kenji later says that he killed them because they ridiculed him, tipped over the edge by his own insecurity and sense of futility. 

Yasuo discovers something similar after being stopped at a roadblock, a policeman expressing sympathy that “they forgot about a punk like you.” Yasuo points the gun at his own head, discovering one last bullet, but it’s not quite clear what happens after that. Yasuo was a wandering ghost anyway, a man of the Showa era haunting the streets of Heisei with a mission to kill a man like himself already dead. On the severed arm Kenji later discovers in his bag, there’s a tattoo of a skull and the motto “help me” which might speak for them all desperately looking for some kind of way out but finding little support. 

But then again, Kenji proves unexpectedly kind caring for Yuri even while Yasuo selfishly considers a double suicide. Dressed in white though also in a T-shirt featuring the cover for Nirvana’s Nevermind which was released in 1991, Kenji is the light and Yasuo the dark despite their mutual violence one bound by nihilism and the other a strange positivity blithely searching for an escaped rabbit just as helpless as he himself may be. Filled with ironic whimsy the film takes place in a purgatorial space inhabited by those displaced by the Bubble who no longer have anything to pin their hopes on while living on borrowed time in a late summer rapidly drawing to a close. 

The Stairway to the Distant Past (遙かな時代の階段を, Kaizo Hayashi, 1995)

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If The Most Terrible Time in My Life was channeling Nikkatsu Noir, Stairway to the Distant Past (遙かな時代の階段を, Harukana Jidai no Kaidan wo) sees Hayashi channel Fukasaku for a full-on confrontation with the legacies of the post-war era just as PI Maiku (Masatoshi Nagase) is forced to confront and attempt to cure the corrupted legacies of his own origins all while trying to save the city of Yokohama from drifting off to “another hell.” This time shooting in colour, Hayashi conjures a sense of mythic dread in the purple haze that hangs over a hidden city and the eerie blue of the path to get there.

But before all that, Maiku has fallen on such hard times his beloved car’s been repossessed and he’s stuck finding lost dogs for wealthy yet eccentric clients. Meanwhile, leader of New Japs gang Kanno (Shiro Sano) is running for political office while two of his underlings decide to freelance in order to take over the lucrative river trade which no one, not even the Taiwanese gang otherwise apparently in the ascendent, has ever dared to touch in fear of the mythic “White Man” who’s controlled the area since the post-war era with a ruthless efficiency that has seen any man challenge him not live to tell the tale. In the midst of it all is bigoted, and apparently pretty corrupt, policeman Nakayama (Akaji Maro) who first blackmails Maiku into helping him investigate a theft and smuggling ring on the river then apparently makes a deal with the White Man’s underlings who in turn blackmail him over his gambling debts but also claim they can make him chief of police if he chooses to play along.

Nakayama is a symbol of the rot in the contemporary city though he is in fact merely spineless, greedy, unpleasant and prejudiced. He asks Maiku for help because he’s hamstrung by the rules of policing which prevent him from doing the nefarious things he asks Maiku to do all of which leads to some pretty tragic consequences and a pair of orphaned children. The New Japs are perhaps a sign of further corruption still to come as Kanno tries to go legit as a politician but only as a means of increasing his influence and earnings. 

The river becomes a kind of nexus, the shore line between contemporary Japan and the “distant past” of the post-war era. Nakayama discovers that no one is technically policing it because it’s outside of everyone’s jurisdiction, while the White Man seems to have been in a position of unassailed power for half a century. As he later says, he’s the only one “living in the past” and perhaps quite literally so as Maiku has to transcend a literal stairway while guided by some kind of local prophet in order to travel to his world and finally risk his life to confront him. At the same time, Maiku is threatened by his own point of origin in the unexpected return of his mother, a now middle-aged stripper known as Dynamite Sexy Lily (Haruko Wanibuchi), who abandoned him and his sister and when he was just a child. 

Her name, along Maiku’s own, are perhaps hangovers from the Occupation era now even more out of place in a changed Japan. Making full use of the colour palate, Hayashi repeatedly flashes back to a pair of Lily’s red shoes as if signalling the unreality of the hidden city and the superimposition of past and present. His flashbacks to the late 1940s echo the cinematography of Fukasaku’s jitsuroku epics with their frenetic chases through black markets, but towards the conclusion the canted angles make it through to our era too and most particularly in the White Man’s lair, a blue-tinged industrial labyrinth that recalls the post-apocalyptic visions of a city still in ruins.

“Yokohama’s changed a lot,” Lily is told on her return and in fact several times after that. She likes it a little better now, the White Man no so much complaining that this city no longer has a place for him as if foreseeing his own eclipse and the oncoming end of an era. But then again, perhaps only the names have changed. All we’re left with is new gangsters with no code, and the White Man did at least stick to the rules even if he did so with ruthless authority. As for Maiku, his passage to the underworld seems to have brought him new clarity. His outfit now a little more sophisticated and mature, less an affectation borne of watching too many movies than an expression of himself. Nevertheless, Yokohama remains a small-town city, a cosy place with a generally friendly and easy going population albeit one with darkness hovering around the edges.

The Stairway to the Distant Past screens 18th/19th October at Japan Society New York.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Most Terrible Time in My Life (我が人生最悪の時, Kaizo Hayashi, 1994)

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A Yokohama PI finds himself investigating a case of tragic brotherhood against the backdrop of a burgeoning gang war in Kaizo’s Hayashi’s retro crime movie The Most Terrible Time in my Life (我が人生最悪の時, Waga Jinsei Saiaku no Toki). In the first of three films featuring detective / cinema projectionist Maiku Hama (yes, that is his real name), Hayashi harks back to the Nikkatsu borderless action films of the 1960s along with classic noir while also exploring contemporary attitudes towards those not born in Japan. 

The force destabilising the local equilibrium is a gang that calls itself the “New Japs” and was founded by Zainichi Koreans who had acquired Japanese citizenship and now accepts members from other nations colonised by Japan who’ve also naturalised. The implication is that they’re agitating because the society still doesn’t fully accept them, something echoed by Maiku’s (Masatoshi Nagase) first client, a mister Kim, who says the police aren’t interested in his case because he’s a foreigner while when he actually encounters him Lieutenant Nakayama (Akaji Maro) does indeed make some quite prejudiced remarks. Hanging out in a mahjong parlour, Maiku comes to the aid of the waiter, Hai Ping (Yang Hai-Ping), newly arrived from Taiwan when he’s hassled by a racist customer noticing that the waiter’s actually carrying a knife under his shirt and might be about to ruin his life. 

Maiku loses a finger in the process (they sew it back on later), leaving Hai Ping to show up at his office with an improbably large amount of money Maiku refuses and then agrees to take when he hires him to find his brother De Jian (Hou Te-Chien) who came to Japan two years previously and has been missing ever since. Hai Ping’s relationship with De Jian speaks to Maiku because he’s also caring for his 16-year-old sister, their parents being absent from their lives just as Hai Ping and his brother were abandoned and then drifted into gang crime as a means of survival. He discovers that De Jian has married a Japanese woman of Chinese descent who like them was separated from her family which explains why she doesn’t speak any Chinese but was trotted out in a cheongsam as an exotic beauty when she was a sex worker which is how De Jian met her and got himself into trouble with gang when they ran away together. 

They are all in their way displaced people trying to get a foothold in Yokohama but finding varying degrees of success. A turf war is apparently about to break out between the Taiwanese and Hong Kong gangs, though we never actually see the one from Hong Kong only the New Japs and the Taiwanese who don’t actually fight but engage in vendettas with Hai Ping who is actually ordered to kill his own brother to prove his loyalty and atone for his crime. Maiku figures this out quite quickly and again tries to stop new his friend from making a huge mistake but not even he can prevent the fatalistic inevitability of the collision of all these competing honour codes and the implosion of a more literal kind of brotherhood in the face of that represented by the gang. 

Despite the film’s title, which in a meta touch flips around on the marquee of the cinema where Maiku has his office which is currently screening The Best Years of Our Lives, Maiku will have some far worse times in his life in subsequent films but the Yokohama we encounter here is a lived-in neighbourhood with its collection of quirky characters and strange goings on. The tone is humorous and ironic as Maiku’s friends have to chase a dog to get his finger back or Maiku’s taxi driver friend reads magazines while driving and changes hats in line with his role, but it has an underlying noirish sense of sadness for the world’s cruelty in the unfolding tragedies Maiku is powerless to prevent. Shooting in a crisp black and white, Hayashi pays tribute to Borderless action with a cameo from Jo Shishido as Maiku’s father figure while allowing Maiku to inhabit a world slightly out of time or existing only in the movies in which detectives are always hardboiled and the only way to be happy is to abandon all your hopes and dreams before the world can destroy them.

The Most Terrible Time in My Life screens 12th/18th October at Japan Society New York.

Original trailer (No subtitles)

General’s Son 3 (將軍의 아들 3 / 장군의 아들 3, Im Kwon-taek, 1992)

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The third and final instalment in the General’s Son trilogy picks up some time after the events of the previous film, not with Doo-han (Park Sang-min) being released from prison but emerging from hiding. After his showdown with Kunimoto, he’d been lying low in a temple but is now on the run, heroically jumping off a train to avoid the police and thereafter making his way to Wonsan and seeking asylum with an affiliated gang. By this time, Doo-han’s role as the son of a legendary general who was murdered by communist traitors while fighting bravely for independence seems to have been forgotten as he wanders around trying to evade the colonial net. 

In Wonsan, he immediately starts causing trouble by objecting to gang leader Shirai’s treatment of an aspiring singer, Eun-sil (Oh Yeon-soo), whom he has more or less imprisoned until she agrees to sleep with him. Doo-han helps her to escape and encourages her to continue pursuing her dreams of stardom, but motions toward romance create an ongoing instability which indirectly echoes throughout the rest of the film as he tries to balance his desire for Eun-sil with the ongoing battle for Jongno and resistance against the Japanese. 

For her part, Eun-sil falls for Doo-han as the man who saved her from Shirai and restored her freedom but still finds herself at the mercy of the Japanese as otherwise sympathetic lieutenant Gondo (Dokgo Young-jae) takes a liking to her after being struck by her singing talent which he apparently did not expect seeing as she is a mere Korean. Later Gondo and Doo-han become accidental rivals when Eun-sil is arrested because of her associations with Doo-han and they have to work together to get her out. Gondo is fiercely critical of their relationship, not only out of romantic jealously but because he finds the Korean approach to romance vulgar. Despite her later agency which sees her primed to reject both men in order to pursue her career, Eun-sil is also a mere device to emphasise Doo-han’s virility as the entire neighbourhood is kept awake by her moans of ecstasy even after Doo-han has been badly injured in a fight, is covered in bandages, and has been told he will need to stay in bed for the next month to recover. 

Gondo meanwhile, in a slightly symbolic gesture, tries to force Eun-sil to marry him by laying his sword on the table and making it plain that if she refuses he will kill her and then himself. Perhaps in a more romantic tale, he might have threatened Doo-han and asked her to make a sacrifice, but in any case Doo-han tries something much the same on hearing the news, having a kitchen knife brought to him and thrusting it into the table. Eun-sil merely seems amused, or perhaps worryingly pleased at open show of romantic jealousy as proof of love, knowing that it is quite unlikely Doo-han is actually going to hurt her (the same cannot be said for Gondo). He still however tries to command her to stay and marry him, refusing to let her leave because she is “his”, but in the end of course it’s bluster and if she chooses to leave he cannot stop her because he is not a man like Shirai or Gondo who would willingly restrict another’s freedom. He is still “fighting for our liberty” after all. 

Meanwhile, he undergoes a parallel “romance” with Dong-hae (Lee Il-jae) who left alone for Manchuria after renouncing the gangster life but has apparently left the Independence Movement because it was too socialist when what he seems to want is individual capitalist prosperity which is why he’s got mixed up in the opium trade. Still on the run, Doo-han seeks out Double Blade, the street thug mentor who brought him into the gang all those years ago. Unfortunately he makes a lot of trouble for Double Blade in annoying one of his underlings who runs a local Chinese gang and then starting a turf war after getting himself into trouble with the bandits who run the drugs trade. He and Dong-hae are eventually separated in the escape from the bandits but reunite when Hayashi (Shin Hyun-joon), who is still nominally running the yakuza but has delegated Jongno to his sadistic brother-in-law Uda, tries to use him in a plot to take out Doo-han once and for all. 

Throughout the series, Doo-han has been a mythic, comic book-style hero who is respected for the integrity of his fists, refusing to use weapons and leaving his opponents beaten but breathing so that they can verbally concede the victory. The previous film had seen him enact a more serious kind of violence, but even so his rival apparently survived only permanently changed. His final confrontation with Hayashi, by contrast, sees him kill for the first time by picking up a blade and then a gun. Nevertheless, he is perhaps the General’s Son after all. According to his gang members, scattered after he left, he is the only force with can keep Jongno free, without him they fell apart and let the Japanese take their streets from them. The final instalment in Doo-han’s story ends on a moment of tempered victory which avenges his gangster honour but places him firmly in the arms of his brother Dong-hae as they temporarily retreat from the battlefield towards an increasingly unstable future.