Tag: 1991

Raise the Red Lantern (大红灯笼高高挂, Zhang Yimou, 1991)

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“Isn’t that a woman’s fate?” 19-year-old Songlian (Gong Li) tearfully asks on defiantly agreeing to drop out of university and become the “fourth mistress” of a wealthy man (Ma Jingwu) in Zhang Yimou’s seminal 1920s-set drama Raise the Red Lantern (大红灯笼高高挂, Dà Hóng Dēnglong Gāogāo Guà). It’s as if she wants to make clear that she has chosen this fate for herself even if, in reality, she has little other choice. She had, in any case, been dependent on her father who has now died. Her step-mother either cannot afford or does not wish to continue paying for her university education, welding her own newfound power and cutting off Songlian’s only possibility of independence.

Even so, it’s clear that she made this decision in temper and has no real idea of what kind of life she has committed herself to. She continues in defiance, declining the palanquin and walking into the master’s house carrying her own suitcase. Encountering the sullen servant girl Yan’er (Kong Lin), she owns her new position as the Fourth Mistress and in someways bends herself to this system by insisting on her superiority, demanding that Yan’er be the one to carry her suitcase into her new home. But it’s after this that she loses all delusion of power. Songlian is encircled by female servants who swarm around her performing various tasks they assure her are “family traditions” which she must now learn to obey.

As the new mistress, and a very beautiful young woman, she enjoys an unusual level of privilege but currently lacks the experience to realise that this holiday period will be short-lived and in reality she has very little currency to bargain with. Introduced to the other mistresses, Songlian begins sizing them up as if she meant to hang on to this crown, but soon realises that they are much more experienced in plotting than she is, and that she has crucially misunderstood the ways in which this world, ruled by arbitrary “tradition”, may work. First Mistress (Jin Shuyuan), an older woman and the mother of the master’s grown up son Feipu (Chu Xiao), is polite but distant, resigned to the fact she can no longer attract the master’s attention but with little to occupy her time. Songlian had thought her major rival to be Third Mistress (He Saifei), a formerly a famous opera singer who tries to leverage her power by interrupting their wedding night claiming that she is ill and calling for the master, little realising that Second Mistress’ (Cao Cuifen) kindness is all strategy and masks a devious heart.

In this way, the master’s compound plays out as an allegory for the wider society. The master himself is never seen clearly and acts merely as a distant authority. With no power of their own, the only currency the women have lies in their proximity to men. These “traditions” pit them against each other to win the master’s favour. Only the chosen mistress has lanterns lit for her in this gloomy environment, receives a foot massage, and gets to decide the menu for the day. But even within this largely female world, there are other divisions in play. Songlian comes to learn that the reason Yan’er took against her, was that she has become sexually involved with the master and hoped that he would make her his official mistress instead. Her hope was an unrealistic as Songlian’s that she would be able to exert control over her life in this environment. The master will never marry a servant girl, and after all he has no need to when she is already sexually available to him, which is the only interest that he has in any of these women outside of their absolute obedience. Wandering around on the upper floors Songlian finds a locked shed ominously referred to as the “death room” where she is told women of past generations hanged themselves, only later coming to understand its grim significance as a symbol of the authoritarian power she now lives under.

In fact, Songlian’s naivety and childish defiance lead to unforeseen consequences including the death of other women trying to navigate this system just as she is. With his trademark use of colour, Zhang opens in the honeymoon period of the summer in which Songlian’s world is illuminated by the warm glow of the red lanterns, only to transition towards autumn and winter in which their light becomes increasingly hellish. White is a colour that has a strong association with death in Chinese culture, and the arrival of the snow enveloping the compound only serves to reinforce the idea of Songlian’s spiritual demise as she comes to realise that there is no escape from this world nor any freedom within it. The fate of the First Mistress presents the very best that she could hope for, leading the dull life of a discarded toy devoid of possibility or emotional fulfilment while otherwise enjoying a fairly basic level of material comfort in return for compliance with the many “traditions” of this world.

The Third Mistress had found a kind of freedom in music, but even Songlian’s flute is taken from her by the jealous master. Eventually she is replaced when the inevitable fifth mistress arrives. The only way in which she can continue to exist in this world is to go mad, wandering the prison-like environment in ghostly fashion wearing the clothes she arrived in and having reverted to a hairstyle only worn by children and very young, unmarried women. In this way the master’s estate becomes a metaphor for the patriarchal superstructure and authoritarianism of the contemporary Chinese society in which there is no such thing as solidarity, only those scrabbling over each other to survive and others so broken they have simply stopped trying.

The 4K restoration of Raise the Red Lantern opens 6th November in UK cinemas courtesy of Central City Media.

Rerelease trailer (English subtitles)

My Soul is Slashed (咬みつきたい, Shusuke Kaneko, 1991)

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Released at the tail end of the Bubble-era, Shusuke Kaneko’s vampire dramedy My Soul is Slashed (咬みつきたい, Kamitsukitai) is one of a series of films that seems to be filled with a prophetic sense of dread and the feeling that the good times are about to come to an end. Fiercely critical of the costs of the salary man dream along with the amoral capitalism that seems to have accompanied it, the film may also be drawing inspiration from a then recent contaminated blood scandal as haemophiliacs in Tokyo and Osaka sued the government in 1989 after contracting HIV through infected transfusions.

The hero, Ishikawa (Ken Ogata), works for a pharmaceuticals company that has been accused of engaging in corrupt practices and bribing the government to be able to sell unlicensed medical products. Ishikawa is not aware of this and does not believe the rumours, so is keen to find out what’s been going on at his company. After making some enquiries and attempting to get in touch with a friend in the media, however, Ishikawa is involved in a hit-and-run and taken to hospital where he receives a blood transfusion but eventually dies of his injuries.

A researcher at the same facility, Yuzuko (Narumi Yasuda), has secretly come by a pack of Dracula’s blood that was apparently lost during the recent revolution in Romania where deposed dictator Ceausescu had been experimenting with it. For reasons best known to herself, she decides to stash the blood in the “do not use” draw of the medical fridge, only for it to come to life and jump into the shelf below. Though there is some concern among the medical staff that the pack is not properly marked with a blood type or other information, other staff members become indignant on being questioned about it, so the operating team go ahead and use the unmarked pack without proper procedure being followed, which is how Ishikawa ends up receiving contaminated blood, in this case that apparently belonging to “Dracula”. A distraught Yuzuko attends Ishikawa’s funeral and tells his teenage daughter Saeko (Hikari Ishida) that, assuming she is a virgin, she can revive her father by sprinkling her blood on his ashes, which she does, though Ishikawa is not resurrected until a year later.

Ishikawa had been a loyal salaryman who worked hard and believed in his company, which is why he was so shocked by the rumours and by the suggestion of his colleague Kitahara (Takero Morimoto) that the buck stops with the company president. As a consequence of his dedication to the firm, however, Ishikawa has neglected his family and become a ghostly presence within his own home to the extent that he hardly ever sees his daughter and has, in fact, forgotten her birthday, asking his secretary to pick up a dress as a present which turns out to be too small for her to wear. Saeko appears rather indifferent towards him while is alive and has also started rebelling by staying out all night with her queer-coded, motorcycle-riding friend. Though she misses him when he’s gone, Saeko is also in favour of her mother remarrying a much more attentive man, Tokita (Kazuyoshi Kushida), who brought her a cake for her birthday and seems to fill in with all the other paternal tasks that Ishikawa never paid any attention to because he was so focused on his career.

It’s his dedication to his company that Ishikawa most regrets on being resurrected. A year has passed and his family’s already moved on, doing just fine without him, while he was scapegoated for the bribery scandal at work and died in disgrace which might explain why both Saeko and her mother are working around the clock to support themselves. He realises that even though he’s come back, he is not the same person and he cannot simply slot back into his former life even if he’s been able to forge a new relationship with Saeko who declares that she doesn’t care if he’s Dracula, he’s still her father and a good person. At the same time, Ishikawa comes to accept his new Dracula persona as a potential means for good, insisting that there are plenty of bloodsucking people in the contemporary society and Dracula doesn’t seem too bad by comparison.

The interesting this is that Yuzuko’s attraction to him also seems to be bound up with his position as a father, having lost her own at a young age. Yuzuko’s father was apparently one of the foremost Dracula researchers in the world who also helped countless vampires return to being human, even if it didn’t work for everyone and some ended up as ashes once again. Though dating an age-appropriate colleague, she complains that he’s “too young” for her, and longs for the centuries-old embrace of Dracula which is also a reflection of her quasi-incestuous desire for her father whom she never really knew. On the other hand, Saeko comes to a new appreciation of her now anti-corporate dad and resolves that, though she may have his workaholic blood, she won’t sacrifice herself for a company and will earn a living doing something she likes while hanging out with her maybe girlfriend.

Which is all to say, Ishikawa is more alive now he’s “dead” than he ever was while his heart was still beating. Using his Dracula powers to expose the company’s wrongdoing and force his killer to confess live on air, he turns his back on culturally defined notions of corporate success and retreats to live a quiet life with Yuzuko, who has also become a vampire, in a travelling blood donation van. “Clean blood is rare these days,” Ishikawa reflects hinting at the various corruptions of the late Bubble society which itself heading for an implosion. The project apparently started because Ogata wanted to play a role completely against type, which he undoubtedly does, in embodying an incongruous source of vampiric paternal authority that is determined to live outside the system rather than chase corporate success.

Once a Thief (縱橫四海, John Woo, 1991)

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A trio of orphans raised to be international art thieves rebel against their mentor when a job goes wrong in John Woo’s throwback to his early comedies, Once a Thief (縱橫四海). A breezy, Lupin III-esque adventure, the film on one level seems to be satirising the vacuity of extreme wealth as the rich spend huge amounts of money to buy stolen paintings they can’t show to anyone while painting our heroes as anti-capitalist rebels for whom the money is but a secondary concern.

They are, after all, having quite a lot of fun with their complicated heists. Though the robberies are finely tuned affairs, we also see that the team are not infallible and often riding on bravado such as Rice Pudding (Chow Yun-fat) failing to land smoothly in the getaway car and being left trailing behind alone. The trio take it in good humour and have a real sense of camaraderie in which they’re forever playing tricks on each other. Not even the intrusion of romantic rivalry can disrupt their friendship as it becomes clear that both Jim (Leslie Cheung) and Rice Pudding are in love with Red Bean (Cherie Chung), with Rice Pudding originally having the upper hand.

There is something quite funny about the fact that the other two are called “Rice Pudding” and “Red Bean” but “Jim” is just “Jim”. Despite the romantic rivalry, there’s also a sense of homoerotic tension that exists between the two men, with Jim cheekily flirting with a portrait artist while boasting of the gang’s success. The European setting adds a sense of sophistication and international glamour that recalls classic Hollywood cinema, while hinting a new globalised society. The gang are wanted by “Interpol”, and the Zenigata-like figure of a Hong Kong policeman (Paul Chu) who acts as a kind of alternate father figure watching over the trio since they were children and trying to get them to give up their life crime.

The man who raised them, Boss Chow (Kenneth Tsang), meanwhile, was cruel and mainly sees them as tools to be used to enrich himself. When Rice Pudding loses the use of his legs and uses a wheelchair to get around, he is more or less disowned as no longer useful, only to be rescued by their Godfather. Rice Pudding, however, is surprisingly adept and able to perform some killer dance moves in his chair not to mention fighting bad guys in much the same way he did before. But despite the cartoonish fun, there is an unexpectedly violent aspect to the gang’s final heist as Jim strangles guards and Rice Pudding throws plastic explosives at their heads which he then detonates remotely. 

Read Bean, meanwhile, is largely relegated to making travel arrangements and hanging around at airports to waiting to find out if her friends have survived or not. She also acts as a kind of interpreter, speaking French to facilitate their deals which suggests Chow trained them in specific ways, though she does not always translate accurately, trying to put the guys off accepting a risky job from a wealthy Frenchman because she wants to get out of their life of crime and settle down even while Rice Pudding and Jim still seem to be addicted to the thrill of the chase. Their mission sees them sneak into a chateau and steal a painting from a hidden cellar they can only access through a secret door while avoiding booby traps like electrified floors and laser fields they cheekily dance the limbo through. 

For them, it was never really about the artwork nor the money, but the sense of achievement in stealing without being caught while running rings around law enforcement. This sense of rebellion which extends in a way towards the capitalist system in which the super wealthy squabble over trinkets while elderly women starve, is eventually turned back on Chow whom they end up defying in order to break free of his control. Chow got greedy, double-crossing just about everyone in order to make his stolen painting more valuable when he sells it and then steals it back again. Filled with zany humour and expertly crafted action sequences, the film never takes itself all that seriously while revealing in the roguish antics of the three gentlemen thieves living their best lives rebelling against a world ruled by wealth and privilege through ingenious crime.

Screened as part of Hong Kong Golden Age 1985-1997 at the Garden Cinema.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Video Girl Ai (電影少女, Ryu Kaneda, 1991)

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The thing about video is that it is essentially one-sided. Though it might be possible to achieve the effect of interactivity, the video itself is obviously not responding to the viewer but proceeding along its preordained path. Then again, in the new AI age, interactivity can also be dangerous as chatbots are programmed to say whatever the user wants to hear, even if it ends up encouraging them to do something harmful to themselves or others.

Video Girl Ai (電影少女, Denei Shojo), whose name means “love”, is definitely not artificial intelligence but a sort of video fairy that the hero discovers after encountering the “paradise” video store which is only visible to the pure of heart. The extremely odd proprietor gives Yota (Ken Ohsawa) a videotape he says will heal him following a moment of heartbreak on learning that the girl he fancied, Moemi (Hiromi Hiraguchi), actually has a crush on his best friend Takashi (Naoki Hosaka). Takashi acts cool, but is actually just as diffident as Yota and also has a crush on Moemi. He can’t say anything either, less because he feels bad for Yota than he just can’t muster up the courage.

Nevertheless, he keeps encouraging Yota even if it may be partly to assuage his own fear in not having to deal with his feelings for Moemi. Everyone seems to think Yota is a bit a of a loser and the kids at school have created a pun on his surname to make it sound like he’s called “Yota no luck with girls.” He is indeed awkward. His first date with Moemi goes incredibly badly. Not only is he late because he went to the wrong place, but is overly obsessed with his carefully constructed itinerary which he keeps checking on his electronic day planner. Unable to adapt to the moment, he irritates his date and is finally unable to say how he feels.

Queue Video Girl AI (Kaori Sakagami) who has been sent to comfort him. Thanks to a malfunctioning VHS player, Ai emerges from the TV set a little differently to how she was described on the back of the case. Though she was said to be kind and graceful, Ai is feisty and immediately starts giving Yota what for. After getting to know him a little, Ai begins to develop human feelings and fall for Yota herself, even though she’s supposed to be comforting his broken heart and supporting his romance with Moemi. At this point, she basically finds herself at the centre of a love square as she flirts with Takashi to get him to back off from Moemi so Yota’s romantic fantasy can come true.

Yota, meanwhile, is a classic nice guy but struggles with interpersonal communication and pales in comparison with his ultra-cool friend Takashi. In this case, the TV really can talk back and interact like a real person. Ai is not, however, very familiar with human customs and asks inappropriate questions in public, such as the nature of marriage and sex which she awkwardly says she wants to try out for herself later without knowing what it is. That he has to sort of train Ai opens up a dialogue and gives Yota a means of teaching himself, but despite the fact that Ai has corporeality, there is still a question mark over whether or not she is “real”. Looking at Ai’s imitation flowers, Yota says they’re still pretty even if they’re just pretend, just the like ready meals that Ai starts buying after realising her cooking’s gone to pot because of the damaged VCR. 

Nevertheless Yota struggles with himself. His love is a pure-hearted kind, so he’s firmly rooting for Moemi and Takashi rather than resentful or trying to keep her to himself despite knowing she likes someone else. He’s torn between his growing feelings for Ai and those he had for Moemi while also uncertain how long Ai can stay before her tape runs out. Ironically enough, she’s eventually told that she can’t voice her feelings or risk erasure because her role is supposed to be purely supportive. Erasure is in a way what Yota and Takashi fear. They’re too afraid to voice their feelings in case the girl rejects them. The first ever girl Yota asked out turned him down, which left him vowing never to tell another girl he liked her again. As he describes it, love is conflicting emotions, but thanks to his friendship with Ai, Yota is beginning to find the courage to face his feelings. There’s a minor irony, then, that he may be destined to forget her in the same way as the memories of an old girlfriend inevitably fade, leaving him clinging on to a forgotten ghost of love rather than risk romantic heartbreak pursuing connection in the real world.

Danger Point: The Road to Hell (Danger Point: 地獄への道, Yasuharu Hasebe, 1991)

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A pair of hitmen find themselves conflicted when their latest target dies gripping the photo of an innocent-looking nurse. Who was this man, what’s his relationship to the woman in the photo, and why did he have to die? Asking questions is taboo when you’re a hired killer, and you’re probably better off not knowing anyway, but there’s something that’s bugging veteran executioner Joji (Jo Shishido) and it’s not just the missing 20 million dollars.

Nikkatsu veteran Yasuharu Hasebe’s V-Cinema noir Danger Point (Danger Point: 地獄への道, Jigoku e no Michi) is a classic tale of nihilistic fatalism in which the bond between the two assassins is tested by the intervention of greed and mystery. Shishido’s Joji is the more old-fashioned of the pair yet fascinated by the mystery behind Sakai’s death, not necessarily wondering if he bears any culpability but confused about why he had to die despite not actually having the missing money. This puts Joji partially at odds with the younger Ken, a more dynamic and less morally ambivalent figure played by the contemporary star Show Aikawa who’d come to represent for V-Cinema what Shishido once had for Nikkatsu action. Together, the chase the various clues they’ve been given looking for the person behind the job and, of course, the missing money.

But the money presents a problem too. Ken begins to wonder if Joji will abandon him and take the prize for himself, though that doesn’t seem to be something that Joji is actively considering. The relationship between the two men is more brotherly than paternal, though Joji does scold Ken for his treatment of Yumi (Nana Okada), the nurse from the hospital and their key witness. He beats and sexually assaults her, though it’s less his lack of chivalry that Joji criticises than the wisdom of bringing a woman into their business. He’s suspicious of Yumi in a way Ken does not seem to be, though they both agree that eventually she’ll have to go before she does them any harm because now she knows too much.

Ultimately, the money turns out to be from a bank job in the Philippines that the American criminals were hoping to convert to US dollars in Japan, though predictably everyone wants the whole amount for themselves, not least Joji and Ken along with the kingpin’s horse-loving girlfriend Saeko (Miyuki Ono) who is playing her own side of the game. Neither Saeko nor Yumi do very well out of this particular affair and are each constrained by the men around them. While Yumi was apparently seduced and abandoned by corrupt cop Sakai, Saeko is hemmed in by her gangster boyfriend Takamura (Hideo Murota) and seeks escape through stealing the money with the help of Sakai, one way or another, at least. Though this world doesn’t seem to want to let either of them have it while the  men fight over the spoils in a desperate struggle to assert dominance over the situation.

As the ironic “Dead End” sign at the film’s conclusion implies, however, that chasing money is a fool’s errand and leads only to hell. A chase past the no entry signs into an industrial complex suggests that this world is not quite fully formed or in the process of falling apart. The ironic and strangely obvious product placement for Perrier sparkling mineral water might hint at a more sophisticated world the hitmen are on one level trying to inhabit, but in other ways their presence is incongruous. They belong to an earlier time as does this hidden world of bank robberies, smuggled cash, criminal gangs and fixers that seem out of place amid the tail end of the Bubble era. Or in that sense at least, perhaps it’s Japan heading for a crash desperately chasing the riches that seem only slightly out of reach. Nevertheless, there’s a genuine sense of mystery that leads Ken and Joji to their final destination in which they discover that it might not be greed that does for them after all, but in an odd way, love. Their desire for togetherness and fear of separation in the end can have only one conclusion and as much as it is the money that leads them to their doom, it’s loneliness and brotherhood that eventually seal their fate.

The Hitman: Blood Smells Like Roses (ザ・ヒットマン 血はバラの匂い, Teruo Ishii, 1991)

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After his fiancée is killed during a yakuza shootout in a restaurant, a former spy in training plots revenge in Teruo Ishii’s Hitman: Blood Smells Like Roses (ザ・ヒットマン 血はバラの匂い, The Hitman: Chi wa Bara no Nioi). Ishii has been in retirement for 12 years before making the film but steps right into the zeitgeist with his bubble-era nightclub opening in which a yakuza goon pretends to be the son of a stockbroker to seduce a young woman he intends to press into prostitution, while looking back to classic noir and the borderless action past.

The young woman is rescued, though not soon enough to escape harm, by the titular hitman, Takanashi (Hideki Saijo), though he does not intervene to save her, only to take out the trio of yakuza who were one side of the gun battle in which his fiancée Reiko (Mikiko Ozawa) was killed. Reiko’s innocence is emphasised by her position as a teacher at a Christian school which is directly contrasted with the sleazy world of contemporary Shinjuku in which Takanashi becomes involved with a series of women. The Asia Town that he strays into is another international space with its samba bars and Filipina hostesses, while Takanashi is later sent to track a boat coming in from the Philippines which is thought to be smuggling guns. 

That’s a tip off he receives from Nakatsuka (Kiyoshi Nakajo), an old mentor from the defence academy who now works for the Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office, the nation’s primary intelligence authority. Nakatsuka is also seen meeting with the police chief who tells him that the yakuza have been complaining that police are encouraging the gang war rather than trying to stop it. So much the better, Nakatsuka says, let them massacre each other then take them all out right before the election to manipulate public opinion. If the election goes their way, the police chief will have additional budget to hire more policemen. Thus Takanashi also becomes a kind of pawn in cynical political machinations conducted by Nakatsuka and CIRO who are helping him both out of friendship and sympathy and because it is useful for him to make use of Takanashi and his desire for revenge. Only veteran policeman Uchino (Tetsuro Tanba) smells a rat, but even he later lets Takanashi go after making a moral judgement that justice has been served and Takanashi hasn’t really done anything wrong.

And so Takanashi tries to avenge Reiko by setting the gangs against each other in a recreation of the original gang war. He’s first frustrated and then aided by Shinjuku party girl Rumi (Natsumi Nanase) who steals his briefcase and gives it to the yakuza, and also be her friend Hisako (Yuki Semba) whom he meets after ducking into a soapland to escape the police. Hisako’s apartment is well furnished with even the modern convenience of an exercise bike, while Rumi’s feels empty, like a hideout with its bare floors and sparse decor. The walls are decorated with posters for Casablanca and Bonnie and Clyde that bring home and older noir past that Takanashi is echoing in his quest to avenge Reiko’s death at the hands of a crime-ridden society. We’re told that he gave up his place at the defence academy and became a truck driver when his parents objected to their marriage, but now fulfils his destiny in tackling the yakuza threat head on.

Meanwhile, as a kind of counter to Rumi, Hisako, and Yasuda’s girlfriend, Kumasa’s woman Beniko (Kimiko Yo) who is very much involved in policy decisions and actively fights back in defence of Kumasa who is otherwise a bit useless. The film is sleazy from its opening rape sequence to the soapland escapade and inexplicable closing credits which consist of a number of raunchy gravure shots backed by a power ballad that otherwise have little to do with the rest of the film, but is perhaps less cynical that it appears or at least seems to edge away from nihilism towards something that appreciates that a more emotional, poetic kind of justice is possible and valid. Takanashi is allowed to complete his quest, though it incurs additional casualties, and then leave the scene having achieved a kind of closure and brought the cycle to an end leaving the rest to Nakatsuka and Uchino who now seems to have crossed over to Nakatsuka’s side if perhaps lamenting that he may be working far too hard to a achieve a justice that now seems surprisingly easy to enact.

Burning Dog (襲撃 ＢＵＲＮＩＮＧ　ＤＯＧ, Yoichi Sai, 1991)

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Freedom lies outside the confines of Japan In Yoichi Sai’s gritty crime thriller Burning Dog (襲撃 BURNING DOG, Shugeki Burning Dog). As the film’s name suggests, Shu (Seiji Matano) is a man on fire looking for a way out. When he’s betrayed by a gang member who shoots him and tries to make off with the do., He hot tails it back to Okinawa but as his old friend Takuji reminds him, he’s still in Japan and not as far from Tokyo as he might like to think. 

Takuji welds his desire for a fake passport against him to convince Shu to participate in his plan to rob a nearby American base on payday. For his part, he doesn’t really know what he wants to do with the money, but later tells his wife Ryoko that they could go anywhere together which is to say the money represents freedom in the ability to escape Japan. Then again, Takuji tells her that they could go the three of them, including his minion Koji who has been sleeping with Ryoko seemingly with his knowledge. There’s a strange kind of homoeroticism between Takuji and Koji that suggests that at least from Takuji’s view it’s a kind of proxy relationship. He allows Koji to sleep with his wife because he can’t actually sleep with him, though he doesn’t really appear to like his wife very much either. Shu tells him off when he first arrives in Okinawa for taking him to a club to look for women, pointing out that he has a wife at home, though Takuji describes her as a kind of inheritance and otherwise chases sex workers while dreaming of a life in which he’s not treated like “garbage” in particular by the Americans. 

“Women never forget when they’ve been wronged,” Shu warns Takuji, though it might also go for his relationship with former flame Mei who also took part in the traumatic bank robbery 10 years previously in which one of their teammates shot a policeman and then got killed. Mei now works at a furniture shop supplying Japanese-style furnishings to the resident Americans including Captain Ford, Takuji’s mark who apparently has no combat experience or chance for promotion but does have a drinking problem and a susceptibility to bribes. The fact he smuggles drugs out from the American base is more literal representation of the corruption caused by the ongoing presence of the American military. The Americans are currently involved in the Gulf War, which according to Takuji is why they’ve taken their eye off the ball. Huge amounts of money are flying through Okinawa to pay soldiers and they won’t be expecting anyone to try to steal it. 

The robbery is then a way of rebelling against the dominance of the American military and the marginalisation of men like Takuji. Captain Ford, meanwhile, may actually be smarter than he looks and a little bit ahead of the game or perhaps not far enough ahead while Mei’s allegiance seems uncertain. Shu’s isn’t all that clear either, but in any case just like back in Tokyo committing a heist together doesn’t so much bring people together as tear them apart. Someone’s double crossed them. It isn’t clear who, but it might not matter to Shu whose only goal has been to leave Japan completely with some money he could actually spend unlike the loot from the Tokyo heist which still hasn’t been laundered. He can’t take it all, but at the same time he may not want to share it and is willing to blast away his last chance at romance or redemption in attempt to escape his traumatic past.

Which is all to say, there are no real winners in this nihilistic game. As much as Shu is an antihero outsider trying to rebel against the constraints of Japanese society, he’s also a rampant misogynist sexually abusing the girlfriends of his targets for information and striking women who displease him while pushed to extremes geographical, social, and psychological. But like many of the hero’s of V-Cinema, the truth is that there is no real place for men like him in post-bubble Japan and only finally breaking free of its constraints can he hope to reclaim his identity and live as a free man.

Stranger (夜のストレンジャー 恐怖, Shunichi Nagasaki, 1991)

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Driving through the city by night, a young woman finds herself plagued by a mysterious force while struggling to break out of her self-imposed inertia in Shunichi Nagasaki’s moody thriller, Stranger (夜のストレンジャー 恐怖). The film’s Japanese title, “night stranger terror”, perhaps more clearly hints at a sense of urban threat while surrounded by so many unfamiliar people, yet it is in many ways Kiriko’s (Yuko Natori) mistrust and suspicion that isolates her from the surrounding society and keeps her trapped in a kind of limbo unable to escape her past.

It might be tempting to read her aloofness as a direct consequence of her experiences, but in an early scene when she was still a bank employee we hear a colleague criticise her for being “anti-social” while Kiriko’s rejection of her seems born more of contempt than shyness or a preference for solitude. Working as a cashier at the bank at the tail end of the bubble is a pretty good job, especially given the still prevailing sexism of the working environment, that positions Kiriko firmly within an aspirant middle-class. She still lives at home surrounded by her family, but is in a relationship with a man who pressures her for money to invest in the stock market. She begins embezzling and lives as if there’s no tomorrow, splashing out on fancy sunglasses before meeting her boyfriend having left work early feigning illness. Unfortunately for her, she gets caught and her boyfriend predictably abandons her.

Just like the asset bubble, her life implodes and plunges her into a lower social stratum as a woman with a criminal conviction for financial impropriety and a hefty debt in needing to pay back the money she stole from the bank for her ex’s harebrained stock speculation schemes. All in all, you could say she’s been betrayed by economic forces, but also as she later admits, but her own uncertain desires in being wilfully deceived by Akiyama (Takashi Naito) and making a clear choice to defraud the bank. She realises that it might not have been a desire to please Akiyama that led her to do it, but the illicit thrill she felt in tapping away on her keyboard stealing the money and otherwise being in a position of economic power over a man, buying him things and taking him out for fancy food. Her sense of malaise is only deepened when she meets Akiyama by chance and tries to tell him all this, but he isn’t really interested. He seems to have moved on and planning to marry another woman. 

Kiriko tries to look at his hands to see if he has burn scars like the man who attacked her in her taxi, but he doesn’t. Perhaps there was a small part of her that wanted it to be him. At least if it was, it would mean he still felt something for her, which would also prove that he ever did. And it would make sense, which is less frightening than her stalker just being a nutty fare, another irate man with a nondescript grudge wandering the city. Taxi driver is one of the few jobs open to her with a criminal record, but it’s also an unusual profession for a woman which further isolates her in her working environment. Her boss keeps calling her “little lady,” while patronisingly offering to put her on the day shift because it’s less dangerous. Kijima (Kentaro Shimizu), an obnoxious colleague, picks at Kiriko for thinking everyone who strikes up a conversation must be sexually interested in her. But the truth is that they are and like Kijima demand her attention. When they don’t get it they’re pissed off. The cab is perhaps the place she feels the most safe, though she faces her fair share of weird fares from drunk men trying to flirt to religious maniacs proselytising from the back seat. 

Now living alone in an apartment, her aloofness is both a personal preference and means of punishing herself. When her brother calls, he encourages her to come home but she says she can’t even though she wants to because she hasn’t yet dealt with her past or taken steps towards being able to forgive herself. She tells Kijima, who in truth behaves in an incredibly creepy way that suggests she’s right to avoid him, that she wonders if she isn’t the only one who can see the mysterious Land Cruiser, as if she were really imagining it. The Land Cruiser does indeed come to stand in for the buried past by which Kiriko is haunted and her eventual besting of it is a symbolic act that suggests she’s finally managed to overcome her guilt and shame to be able to leave the past behind.

As she told Kijima, this was something only she could do by her own hand or none. Akiyama’s dismissiveness of her reflects the fact that he couldn’t give her this absolution either, she needed to find it for herself. Kijima accused her of still being hung up on the guy that scammed her, but that wasn’t quite it. The resolution might hint at his being right when he told her that she needed to learn to trust people more in that it seems to lead to a greater willingness to open herself up to the world. Once again, her sunglasses get broken as a new truth becomes visible to her. A lonely little boy she meets who, like her, enjoys driving in circles and going nowhere, probes her lack of human connection by suggesting that she doesn’t know what it’s like to love someone which is why she can’t understand his obviously inappropriate love for her, though it’s a fact that Kiriko has to acknowledge is truth in interrogating the reality of her relationship with Akiyama.

Nevertheless, in the end, she saves herself and embraces her solitude and independence looking out at the peaceful bay in a city that no longer seems so threatening even if the unseen threat in this case did turn out to be random and have no rational explanation. Nagasaki never again worked in the realms of V-Cinema and his entry is fairly atypical in starring an older, established actress as an action lead while requiring no nudity or sexual content, instead quite literally allowing her to grab the wheel and take control of her life to claim freedom and independence rather than solely romantic fulfilment.

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Death Threat (女囚さそり 殺人予告, Toshiharu Ikeda, 1991)

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It had been 14 years since the conclusion of the rebooted Female Prisoner Scorpion series and 18 since the iconic Meiko Kaji had stepped away from the role when Toshiharu Ikeda decided to resurrect the iconic Nami Matsushima for Toei’s V-Cinema line. Ikeda was reportedly a fan of the original series and put his name forward to direct with the intention of getting Kaji to return as a now middle-aged Sasori but she turned him down flat so they instead embarked on a quasi sequel in which the original Nami has died and another woman slowly takes her place to become the next incarnation of the legend.

Consequently, Scorpion is not the protagonist of this film that otherwise bears her name. Cast in the lead role of a nameless hit woman, Natsuki Okamoto was then a popular pinup model known as “High Leg Queen”. The film opens with her emerging from a barrel of concrete after being dumped by a group of men who had gang raped and then left her for dead. She’s then rescued by a yakuza, Kaizu (Minori Terada), who teaches her how to kill and is effectively her handler. After posing as a bigger to knock off an obnoxious businessman, he’s recruited by Goda (Kenji Imai), the former warden prison stabbed in the eye (though not by Nami as he claims here) in the original trilogy but now a local councillor with aspirations of being elected to parliament. The prison is about to be redeveloped and Goda claims he’s been keeping Nami a prisoner in the dungeon for the last 20 years so he needs her knocked off before anyone bothers to have a look down there.

Of course, there are a few things that don’t make sense with this scenario and are out of continuity with the events of the original trilogy. In any case, now called 701 the assassin infiltrates the prison and knocks off a woman she’s been led to believe is the original scorpion but may not actually be. It seems Scorpion has already passed into legend and the woman has become less important than the idea or the inspiration she provides to the other inmates who are then minded to rebel against authority. By hiding Scorpion away, the authorities have made a rod for their own back in allowing her apotheosis into a goddess of vengeance of all women kind.

701 is in a way reborn as Sasori. Betrayed by the people who hired her, she’s crucified in the courtyard until rescued by fellow inmate and Sasori fan Shindo (Mineko Nishikawa) who helps her try to escape from the prison in an attempt to find out what happened to the “real” Nami. It’s she who first likens the fire in 701’s eyes to that of the Scorpion and begins to give her permission to take on her name and mission. A line is drawn between the two in Nami’s incasement in concrete and 701’s breaking out of it in the opening sequence. Though it would be wrong to call this horror film, Ikeda makes frequent use of ghostly techniques to imply Nami’s apotheosis such as the sound of her spoon scraping the concrete which she later bequeaths to 701 who then becomes the “new” Scorpion. 

The film was in fact a big hit for Toei video and theatrical sequel was planned as a co-production with Golden Harvest in Hong Kong though the project fell through when Okamoto took a break from show business ostensibly for health reasons though there were rumours she had objected to the requirements for nudity. Contrary to expectations for a straight to video release, there is not actually a lot of sexual content in the film which is mainly restricted to a single sequence in which two prisoners pretend to get it on in order to distract a guard to facilitate an escape attempt. Unlike other instalments in the series, the film doesn’t have a lot of women in prison elements either, though it does make space for Dump Matsumoto, a popular villain character from women’s wrestling, as a sadistic guard with a crush on another warden who is she says the only one who treated her like a woman. Instead, it focuses on 701’s passage towards becoming Scorpion and the fulfilment of her twin missions as an avenger of wronged women breaking free from the concrete dungeon of patriarchal oppression to take bloody revenge on the forces of corruption.

Trailer (English subtitles)

General’s Son 2 (將軍의 아들 2 / 장군의 아들 2, Im Kwon-taek, 1991)

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A year after General’s Son struck box office gold, Im Kwon-taek returns to colonial Korea picking up pretty much where he left off with Doo-han (Park Sang-min) once again getting released from prison only this time to a hero’s welcome. Pushing deeper into the colonial era, The General’s Son 2 (將軍의 아들 2 / 장군의 아들 2, Janggunui adeul 2) takes place in increasingly straitened times in which the Japanese are both in control and on the offensive, using the colonial base to strike further into Manchuria while Doo-han discovers a little more about his legendary father and the fate of the Independence Movement in exile. 

Like the first film, the sequel largely consists of a series of episodes in which Doo-han fights and defeats his various rivals. The major change this time is that he begins in defeat as the early celebrations of his return give way to a dawn raid by Hayashi’s yakuza after which Doo-han is dragged into the town square and forced into submission. When Doo-han’s mentor Ki-hwan (Min Eung-shik) is also released from prison, the gang opts for a truce, but Ki-hwan then absents himself after realising Hayashi has tricked him leaving Doo-han in charge. 

During the first film Doo-han’s Korean gangsters had been presented as unambiguously good, standing between the ordinary people and Japanese oppression. While Doo-han was away, however, things have changed. The Japanese have infiltrated Jongno and the Jongno gang has lost the support of the merchants through pressing them too hard for collection money. Doo-han’s first task is then to get the smaller Korean gangs back on side, fighting the local Mokpo kingpin to ensure he resumes sending taxation payments back to Jongno. His main source conflict, however, is still with Dong-hae (Lee Il-jae), the Korean fighter working for the yakuza whom he defeated at the end of the previous film but who got his own back by getting the jump on him at the beginning of this one. 

As a defender of Korean liberty, Doo-han’s side mission is to win back Dong-hae to the side of right, reminded of their childhood meeting by a repeat of the flashback in which he helps a starving Dong-hae cadge a meal by teaching him how to dine and dash. The Dong-hae dilemma is compounded by Doo-han’s increasingly complicated love life which begins with a brief flirtation with Setsuko, a half-Korean Japanese woman working at a gangster-friendly bar who seems to have taken a liking to him, but then later transfers to Chae-hwan (Song Chae-Hwan), a new gisaeng at his regular hangout who is sweet on Dong-hae and is also carrying baggage because her late husband was stoned to death as a traitor when the Japanese discarded him. 

Through Chae-hwan, Doo-han gets to know a dissident author, Park Gye-ju, whose novel Pure Love he pays two high school students to read aloud to him because he is still illiterate. According to Gye-ju, Doo-han’s general father is dead, assassinated by communist traitors among his men including such esteemed names as Kim Il-sung, placing Doo-han at a peculiar intersection of anti-communist and anti-Japanese ideology. Despite that however, Doo-han is warned off associating with Gye-ju because of his “suspicious ideology” by his arch nemesis, Kunimoto, formerly “Lee” the Korean detective working for the Japanese who arrested him all the way back at the beginning of his journey in the first movie.

Traitorous Koreans rather than the Japanese are the main antagonists with Kunimoto first among them, but then as Chae-hwan puts it it’s not the fault of the world only the Japanese whose continuing oppression has placed them all into these perilous positions. Dong-hae weighs up his options, persuaded to end his problematic associations with Hayashi despite his previous assertion that he didn’t care where the money came from he only wanted to survive. The world abandoned us first, he explains, what else was there to do? Chae-hwan criticises Doo-han, suggesting that he’s using his fists not for the people of Korea but for himself, convincing Dong-hae that he can be “saved” if he leaves the gangster world behind. Like his nation, he decides he wants “independence”, eating his own food bought with his own money, rather than remaining at the mercy of a higher authority be that Hayashi or Doo-han. 

The Japanese army, however, believe themselves above the law and answer only to the emperor. Dong-hae’s decision brings him further into conflict with Doo-han, rejecting not just the law of the street but provoking romantic jealousy. As Chae-hwan points out love isn’t a fight you win or lose, but it’s still at the mercy of the various political forces in play and in not in any way helped by Doo-han’s childish provocation of Japanese soldiers at Setsuko’s bar. In any case, Doo-han remains a folk hero, concluding his final showdown with his first show of real violence with active consequences, but in the end protected by the people of Jongno as they offer themselves as human shields holding back the forces of oppression while Doo-han remains trapped in a world of pointless gangster violence.