Tag: Akio Tanaka

The Last Dance (大病人, Juzo Itami, 1993)

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A self-involved film director gets a lesson in what it is to live when he discovers that he has terminal cancer in a lighthearted melodrama from Juzo Itami, The Last Dance (大病人, Daibyonin). Itami was apparently inspired by his own stay in hospital after being attacked by yakuza offended by his previous film Minbo and like his debut The Funeral the film has a few questions to ask about the nature of death along with the functioning of the medical system. 

That’s partly because film director Buhei Mukai (Rentaro Mikuni) is not initially told of his diagnosis. His well-meaning doctor, Ogata (Masahiko Tsugawa) a old university friend of his wife, elects to tell him only that he has a stomach ulcer in keeping with an old-fashioned policy that worries patients may lose hope and give up too easily on discovering the extent of their illness. Buhei meanwhile continues to obsess about his condition, convinced it must be cancer and that his wife, Mariko (Nobuko Miyamoto), and the medical staff are lying to him, at one point pretending to be his own uncle in order to tease the truth out of Ogata over the phone and attempting suicide when he accidentally implies that Buhei may not have long left. 

His distress is compounded by the irony that in the film he was working on when he became ill he was starring as a composer with advanced cancer whose wife has also been diagnosed with a more aggressive form of the disease. Whatever we might think about Buhei, it’s fair to say that the film’s sexual politics have not aged well. Not only was he having an affair with the actress playing his wife, but continues to flirt inappropriately with the medical staff and at one point even tries to force himself on his wife who was in the process of leaving him when he was first diagnosed. His lechery seems primed to appeal to men of a similar age while hinting at his virility and desire for life, but is nevertheless crass and often uncomfortable. Nevertheless, as Mariko says he’s like a child inside cheekily joking with the doctors about his drinking and smoking habits while running away from anything unpleasant and trying to get out of having to undergo treatment. 

Itami had often remarked on the weaknesses of Japanese men who “can’t stand loneliness, can’t make decisions alone, can’t face anyone who disagrees with them and can’t accept responsibility for their mistakes,” Buhei seemingly possessing all four. In part regretting her decision to keep the seriousness of his illness from him, Mariko reflects that in the end all they did was leave Buhei alone in his fear and anxiety as the only one who didn’t know the truth, engineering a kind of conspiracy as they cheerfully told him to “soldier on” knowing there was no hope. Yet during his time in the hospital, Buhei is also confronted by the ethical dilemmas of medical treatment on witnessing doctors desperately try to resuscitate a man who was miserable, in pain, bedridden, and unable to communicate, just waiting for the end. As even his grieving wife calls out to the doctors to let him go, Buhei wonders if it’s right to preserve life at all costs especially when the patient has not been given a choice in his treatment and may not have been informed that they have no possibility of recovery. 

Coming to a new realisation he challenges Ogata’s conviction that death is his enemy, telling him that he should see it less as defeat than acceptance reflecting on the irony that he never felt so alive as when dying. Whimsical if occasionally maudlin, Itami throws in a surrealist dream sequence in which Buhei approaches the other side and comes to realise that death might not be so frightening after all even as he watches himself from above in an out of body experience witnessing the accidental violence inflicted on his body by those trying to save it. In some senses, Buhei is fairly unredeemed, winking at his indifferent mistress even on his death bed, but is in others humbled as he looks back on his life with its regrets and unfulfilled promises, repairing his relationship with his long suffering wife while admitting that under different circumstances he and Ogata might have become good friends. Offering a sometimes critical view of medical practice and ethics, Itami’s poetic meditation on what it is to die loses none of his ironic humour even in its unfolding tragedy. 

The Petrified Forest (化石の森, Masahiro Shinoda, 1973)

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An angst-ridden medical student wrestles with truth and responsibility while drawn into a toxic relationship with a childhood friend and trying to avoid the estranged mother he resents in Masahiro Shinoda’s dread-laden melodrama The Petrified Forest (化石の森, Kaseki no Mori). Based on a novel by Shintaro Ishihara who later became a very conservative mayor of Tokyo and made his name with a series of “Sun Tribe” novels centring on the nihilistic hedonism of wealthy post-war youth, Shinoda’s noirish drama paints contemporary Tokyo as a duplicitous place in which hate is the only possible emotion and self-delusion the only path out of existential loneliness. 

Haruo’s (Kenichi Hagiwara) first conflict, however, is with the medical profession. He objects to the old-fashioned methods of his professor, Miyaji (Torahiko Hamada), who adopts the position of the physician as god only giving his patients the information he thinks they should have rather than the truth. A young boy, Kazuhiko (Masami Horiuchi ), is brought in with an aggressive brain tumour. Given how how quickly it regrows, there is a possibility that the boy cannot be cured while operating will likely mean he will lose his hearing. Though Miyaji knows all of this, he continues to give false reassurance to the boy’s mother, Kikue (Masako Yagi), even after making a snap decision on the table to excise the tumour knowing it will leave him deaf telling her that her son’s hearing might come back in time. Pressed for an answer, Haruo gives her the more honest prognosis that it “might”, “if he’s lucky”, but resents himself for “lying” knowing that Kazuhiko will be deaf all his life and the tumour may still recur. One of the reasons he wants Miyaji to tell the truth is so that the family can accept the situation and start working on the best ways to help Kazuhiko adjust, but Miyaji refuses to explain and in fact threatens to fire him if he won’t do as he’s told.

This resistance to a male authority figure might explain why he identifies so closely with childhood friend Eiko (Sayoko Ninomiya) now in Tokyo working at a barber’s offering male beauty treatments. Eiko is being sexually harassed by her middle-aged boss who is jealous and possessive. At one point she claims that he beat her and locked her up in a cupboard for two days after she told him she had slept with Haruo. The pair agree that he boss needs to die, rebelling against his corrupt and patriarchal authority. ”When you hate you must hate all the way” Haruo insists, explaining that the human race is “petrified”. They can only hate and loathe and lie to themselves in order to bear it. Haruo suggests they’ll eventually come to hate each other, but Eiko is certain that he’s her one exception though as will be revealed hate is eventually where they will end up. 

Fascinated by a high tech pesticide supposedly discovered by the Germans while they were testing poisonous gases but perfected by Japan Pharma, Haruo decides to use it poison to Eiko’s boss suggesting she put it in nail varnish and offer him a manicure. But once the deed is done he finds himself conflicted, unable to live with himself as a murderer which he now is seeing as he was present and applied the gauze soaked in the poison to the boss’ face while “treating” him after he had been “taken ill”. He distances himself from Eiko who irritates him by bringing over her hoover, somehow confused by her intention to move in now that they are married not least by their crime. Eiko, however, allies herself with his estranged mother Tatsuko (Haruko Sugimura) who is desperate to live with Haruo as it turns out by any means possible. 

There is an undeniable whiff of misogyny in the depiction of the two women, Eiko less damsel in distress than wilful manipulator and Tatsuko a classic overbearing mother though one apparently indifferent to her other two children including an apparently doting younger son. Haruo is caught between the two while otherwise drawn to Kikue in part because of her relationship with her son laying bare the apparent mother complex which defines his life as Eiko eventually points out calling him a coward who secretly craves his mother’s approval. Haruo’s resentment towards Tatsuko stems from having caught her with another man, his reaction both sexual jealously and puritanism unable to forgive for the transgression of adultery. Yet history later repeats itself, Kazuhiko who is at that point deaf walking in on Haruo and his mother. Haruo hugs him and covers his eyes only for the boy to later lose his sight and Kikue to go out of her mind wailing that she has destroyed her son through her sexual transgressions. 

Kikue had taken Haruo to a strange cult where she hoped Kazuhiko would be cured though he wouldn’t enter the church and later got into a conversation with the monk who is a former doctor but now believes medicine is a con because it cannot offer you salvation tacitly agreeing with Haruo’s assertion that doctors too are dishonest. This tendency to hate has rendered everyone lonely, Tatsuko’s daughter reminding her that she is lonely too even with her husband and children while Tatsuko later cruelly uses Eiko’s loneliness against her as a tool of manipulation. “Eiko trusted me too much” she explains, her attempt at female solidarity and forging a bond through their shared desire to possess Haruo obviously failing to overcome Tatsuko’s matriarchal machinations. The eerie blue colour of the poison vial, mirrored in the nebuliser forever used by Tatsuko, seems to loom behind them as a reminder of human loathing while mother and son are frequently caught in multiple mirrors in an echo of their duplicity yet in the end as Tatsuko says they share the same sin and it seems Haruo will never really be able to escape the matriarchal net.

Blood is Dry (血は渇いてる, Kiju Yoshida, 1960)

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Blood is dry DVD coverIn the new post-war economy, everything is for sale including you! Kiju (Yoshishige) Yoshida’s second feature Blood is Dry (血は渇いてる, Chi wa Kawaiteru) takes its cues from Yasuzo Masumura’s earlier Technicolor corporate satire Giants and Toys, and Frank Capra’s 1941 comedy Meet John Doe in taking a faceless corporate drone and giving him a sense of self only through its own negation. The little guy is at the mercy not only of irresponsible capitalist fat cats, but of his own imagination and the machinations of mass media who are only too keen to sell him impossible dreams of individual happiness.

The action opens with a grandstanding rooftop speech from a former CEO to his distressed workforce informing them that because of “indifferent capitalism” this small business is going bust and everyone’s out of a job. Then, dramatically, our hero Kiguchi (Keiji Sada), steps out with a pistol and threatens to shoot himself, proclaiming that he no longer cares for his own life but doesn’t want anyone else to lose their job. Another worker, Kanai (Masao Oda), tackles Kiguchi and the gun goes off. Thankfully, he is only mildly wounded but Kiguchi’s case reaches the papers who make it into a human interest issue exemplifying the precarious economic conditions of the modern society. While he’s still somewhat current, an enterprising advertising executive hits on the idea of getting Kiguchi to act as the face of their campaign, bizarrely attempting to sell life insurance with the image of a man putting a gun to his head while proclaiming that “it’s high time everyone is happy”.

When we first meet him, Kiguchi is indeed a faceless, broken man at the end of his tether. His noble sacrifice is interpreted as an act of war on an unfair capitalist society, but as he later affirms in exasperation, Kiguchi had no political intent and never considered himself as acting with a greater purpose, he was simply terrified at the prospect of losing his job which is, in a sense, also his entire identity. Shy and mild-mannered, he stammers through speeches and curls himself into a hostile ball of awkwardness in front of the camera but ad exec Nonaka (Mari Yoshimura) is sure that only makes him a better sell for being “real” and relatable. Like the hero of Meet John Doe, however, Kiguchi starts to buy into his own hype. He fully embraces his role as the embodiment of the everyman, at once gaining and losing an identity as he basks in the unexpected faith of his adoring populace.

Kiguchi’s conversion wasn’t something Nonaka had in mind and it frightens her to realise she has lost control of her creation. Meanwhile, Nonaka’s ex, a paparazzo with a penchant for setting up celebrities in compromising situations in order to blackmail them, has it in for Kiguchi as the personification of his own dark profession. He resents the idea of using “suicide” as a marketing tool and the cynical attempt to sell the idea of happiness through the security of life insurance which, it has to be said, is a peculiarly ironic development.

Kiguchi’s liberal message of happiness and solidarity does not go down well with all – he’s eventually attacked in a taxicab by a right-wing nationalist posing as a reporter who accuses him of being a traitor to Japan, and it’s certainly not one which appeals to the forces which created him. Nevertheless, he does begin to capture something of the spirit of the man in the street who just wants to be “happy” only to have his message crushed when his image is tarnished by tabloid shenanigans and left wondering if the only way to reclaim his “artificial” identity is to once again destroy himself in sacrifice to his new ideal.

Yet Kiguchi’s motivation is both collectivist and individual as he claims and abandons his identity in insisting that he belongs to the people. His confidence is born only of their belief in him and without it he ceases to exist. Kiguchi’s entire identity has been an artificial creation with an uncertain expiry date and his attempts to buy it authenticity only damn him further while his actions are once again co-opted by outside forces for their own aims. The little guy has achieved his apotheosis into a corporate commodity leaving the everyman firmly at the mercy of his capitalist overlords, dreaming their dreams of consumerist paradise while shedding their own sense of self in service of an illusionary conception of “happiness”.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Man with a Shotgun (散弾銃の男, Seijun Suzuki, 1961)

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Man with a Shotgun 1961Nikkatsu’s “Borderless Action” seemingly opened a portal to a world entire to be found within Japan itself. Man with a Shotgun (散弾銃の男, Shotgun no Otoko) is, as the title suggests, another tale of a wandering, gun toting hero though this time one less of aimless flight from failure, responsibility, or rejection than of revenge. Hideaki Nitani gets a (relatively) rare chance to strut his stuff as the lead in a full colour picture, perhaps incongruously starring as one of Nikkatsu’s singing cowboys but he does certainly lend his characteristic sense of gravitas and authority to an otherwise underwritten role.

Ryoji (Hideaki Nitani) rocks up at at rickety bridge looking for a nearby shrine only to be warned off by a grumpy old man in a van. You don’t want to go up there, he tells him, there’ll be trouble if you do. Ryoji is, he claims, a hunter and so he’s not afraid. After all, he’s still in Japan – it’s not as if the entire place is infested with lions and tigers. Then again it’s not exactly game he’s come to hunt.

When he reaches the shrine, Ryoji finds himself in a strange mini kingdom presided over by mill owner Nishioka (Akio Tanaka). The few locals who still live in the village mingle uncomfortably with the migrant work force who people the mill while Nishioka dominates the local economy by owning the only bar in town which is also the only place his largely male workforce have to blow off steam. After getting roughed up by three of Nishioka’s henchmen on the way into town, Ryoji makes the first of many enemies when he stands up to fellow drifter Masa (Yuji Kodaka) when he threatens to throw a man’s daughter to the sex starved labour force unless he pays his debts. The sheriff, an ineffectual local, gets himself seriously wounded meaning the position becomes temporarily open. Nishioka, originally a “benevolent” dictator, is in danger of becoming less so when it is suggested he also form a police force given that the state authorities can’t be bothered with such a remote little village. Ryoji doesn’t quite want to stand for that and volunteers only for Masa to do the same, but the argument is eventually settled to one side of their continued male posturing.

As far as westerns go, Man with a Shotgun leans heavily towards colonial romance and adventure rather than your typically arid, dusty world of saloons and ranches. Lush and green, the small mountain town smacks more of the jungle as does Nitani’s idiosyncratic costume which arrives somewhere between chic safari and fashionable cowboy. Claiming to be a “hunter” Ryoji wanders around with self satisfied smugness, certain that he’s bringing justice to this lawless town all while he makes investigations into the matter which sent him wandering in the first place. Of course, while he’s here, there are other damsels in distress including Setsuko (Izumi Ashikawa) – the younger sister of the sheriff’s late wife, apparently raped and killed by “drifter” bandits.

“Drifters” turn out to be the scapegoated big bad as the migrant workforce quickly take over this little town, making trouble in the bar and hassling the locals, only the locals don’t seem to mind as much as they say they do. There’s trouble at the mill, but not quite the kind that might be imagined. Nishioka has his sticky fingers in some nasty business which also involves not just migrants but actual foreigners and illegal activity on a grand scale. As it turns out, some people are in on the action and some aren’t, and Nishioka is currently making a few calculations as to how to “eliminate” a few inconveniences – something to which he thinks Ryoji and his sparring partner Masa might turn out to be the perfect solution.

Like many a Nikkatsu hero Ryoji is a noble sort, something which engineers for him a happier ending than many get even if it has to be bittersweet to hint at possible followup instalments where Ryoji takes names and fights crime in other small towns. Nevertheless, given the choice he opts for the cool guy conclusion of firing into the air and casting his burdens away rather than damning himself forever in becoming what he hates. Shooting in colour even if not quite with Nikkatsu’s A-list, Suzuki doesn’t get much scope to flex his muscles but does make pointed use of painted backdrops coupled with location shooting, as well as doing everything he can to bring out Nitani’s cowboy cool and adding in a number of B-movie western cliches from letters delivered by a knife thrown into a door to the constant refrains of the title song. Still even if it largely lacks Suzuki’s anarchic touch save for the stylishly composed and absurdly humorous bar room brawls, there’s plenty of fun to be to had with Ryoji and his shotgun as they protect the innocent and seek justice in an often unjust world.

Available as part of Arrow’s Seijun Suzuki: The Early Years Vol. 2 Border Crossings box set.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

A Taxing Woman (マルサの女, Juzo Itami, 1987)

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A Taxing Woman posterIn bubble era Japan where the champagne flows and the neon lights sparkle all night long, even the yakuza are incorporating. Having skewered complicated social mores in The Funeral and then poked fun at his nation’s obsession with food in Tampopo, Juzo Itami turns his attention to the twin concerns of money and collective responsibility in the taxation themed procedural A Taxing Woman (マルサの女, Marusa no Onna). Once again starring the director’s wife Nobuko Miyamoto, A Taxing Woman is an accidental chronicle of its age as Japanese society nears the end of a period of intense social change in which acquisition has divorced mergers, and individualism has replaced the post-war spirit of mutual cooperation.

Ryoko Itakura (Nobuko Miyamoto), a single mother and assistant in the tax office, has a keen eye for scammers. She demonstrates this on a stakeout with a younger female colleague in which she keeps a shrewd eye on the till at her local cafe and comes to the conclusion that they’ve been running a system where they don’t declare all of their cheques. Running her eyes over the accounts of a mom and pop grocery store, she notices some irregularities in the figures and figures out the elderly couple feed themselves from the supplies for the shop but don’t “pay” themselves for their own upkeep. That might seem “perfectly reasonable” to most people, but it’s technically a small form of “embezzlement” and Ryoko doesn’t like figures which don’t add up. Seeing as the couple probably didn’t realise what they were doing was “wrong” she lets them off, this time, as long as they go by the book in the future. A more complicated investigation of a pachinko parlour finds a more concrete form of misappropriation, but Ryoko is fooled by the owner’s sudden collapse into inconsolable grief after being caught out and leaves him in the capable hands of his confused accountant.

Nevertheless, Ryoko may have met her match in sleezy corporate yakuza Hideki Gondo (Tsutomu Yamazaki). Dressing in a series of sharp suits, Gondo walks with a pronounced limp that hints at a more violent past but as his rival from the Nakagawa gang points out, violence is a relic of a bygone era – these days gangsters go to jail for “tax evasion” as means of furthering their “business opportunities” and facilitating ongoing political corruption. Gondo’s business empire is wide ranging but mainly centres on hotels, which is how he arouses Ryoko’s interest. She looks at the numbers, does a few quick calculations, and realises either the business isn’t viable or the correct figures aren’t being reported. Ryoko doesn’t like it when the books don’t balance and so she sets her sights on the seedy Gondo, but quickly discovers she has quite a lot in common with her quarry.

Itami was apparently inspired to make A Taxing Woman after the success of Tampopo shoved him into a higher tax bracket. Given Japanese taxes (at the time) were extremely high, getting around them had become something of a national obsession even if, in contrast to the preceding 30 years or so, there was plenty of money around to begin with. More than the unexpected tendency towards civil disobedience the times seemed to cultivate, Itami homes in on the increasingly absurd desire for senseless acquisition the bubble era was engendering. Thus Gondo who owns a large family home well stocked with symbols of his rising social status, also occupies a bachelor pad where he keeps a mistress which reflects the gaudy excess of the age right down to its random stuffed hyena. Nevertheless when one of the tax clerks asks for some advice as to how to have it all, Gondo replies that that’s easy – to save money, you simply avoid spending it. Gondo lets his glass run over and delights in licking the edges. It’s all about delayed gratification, apparently, and having a secret room full of gold bars to gaze at in order to relieve some of that anxiety for the future.

Gondo, like many of his ilk, has “diversified” – yakuza are no longer thuggish gangsters but incorporated organisations operating “legitimate” businesses through “illegitimate” means. Thus we first find him using a nurse who allows herself to be molested by an elderly, terminally ill client whose identity they will steal to found a company they can quickly dissolve when he dies to shift their assets around and avoid the tax man. Later he pulls another real estate scam by pressing a desperate family but his real focus is the love hotels, whose slightly embarrassing existence ensures that not many come poking around. Ryoko, however, is unlikely to let such a large scam slide and delights as much in closing loopholes as Gondo does in finding them. Noticing a kindred spirit, Gondo quite openly asks his new tax inspector “friend” what she’d think if he married his mistress, gave her all his money, and divorced her – divorce proceeds are after all tax free. Sounds great, she tells him, as long as you trust your wife not to skip town with all the doe.

Ryoko, a modern woman of the bubble era, single and career driven, is a slightly odd figure with her officious approach to her job and unforgiving rigour. Unlike her colleague who dresses in the glamorous and gaudy fashions of the times, Ryoko wears dowdy suits and her mentor boss is always reminding her about her “bed hair”, meanwhile she stays late at the office and offers instructions to her five year old son over the phone as to how to microwave his dinner. Though there is another woman working with her at the tax office, when she’s finally promoted to full tax inspector status she finds herself in a room full of guys who apparently hardly ever go home. On her first job she’s only really brought along because she’s a woman and they want to threaten a mob boss’ mistress with a strip search to find a missing key for a safety deposit box. The mistress, however, tries to throw them off the sent by publicly stripping off and encouraging them to check her “cavity” if they’re so keen to find this key, only for Ryoko to find it under the sink while all the guys are busy being shocked. Ryoko’s methods are occasionally as underhanded as Gondo’s and, like his schemes, built on gaming the system but she’s certainly a force to be reckoned with for those considering defrauding the Japanese government.

Gondo’s schemes excel because they aren’t entirely illegal, only clever ways of manipulating the system, but they’re also a symptom of a large conspiracy which encompasses improprieties right up the chain as banks, corporations, and politicians are all part of the same dark economy managed by a corporatising yakuza. Gondo takes frequent calls from a local representative who often “helps him out”. Later the same representative tries to put pressure on the tax office to back off, but Ryoko’s boss points out that he doesn’t need to because the press are already on the story so he should probably get started on his damage control rather than bothering public servants. Gondo and Ryoko, perhaps as bad as each other, lock horns in a battle wills but discover a strange degree of respect arising between them in having discovered a worthy adversary. There’s something undeniably absurd in Ryoko’s firm determination to catch out struggling businesses and the confused elderly with the same tenacity as taking on a yakuza fronted conspiracy, and there’s something undeniably amusing in Gondo’s attempts to beat the man by playing him at his own game, but the overall winner is Itami who once again succeeds in skewering his nation’s often contradictory social codes with gentle humour and a dispassionate, forgiving eye.

Currently available to stream in the US/UK via FilmStruck.

Original trailer (no subtitles)