Sunday, September 30, 2012

September 30: Tokyo Drifter/Tôkyô nagaremono (1966 -- Seijun Suzuki)

★★★★

Life imitates art.  The last film I saw by Suzuki, Take Aim at the Police Van, was in black-and-white and ended in a train yard.  Tokyo Drifter starts in a train yard in black-and-white, focuses on a single red gun, and then shifts into the full-blown color it’s famous for.  It’s as though a director were managing my film watching.

However, that director wouldn’t be Suzuki because such a transition would be far too fluid.  One of the style flourishes that stands out here --  and in Suzuki’s work in general, I think – is the jump cutting that makes a viewer work to figure how to get from scene A to scene B.  The first attack on Tetsu after he leaves Tokyo is typical of the abrupt cutting.  We see a gang attacking the hideout, we see Tetsu fighting them, we see him walking in snow whistling, we see the face-off with Viper on the track and then we’re back in Tetsu’s hotel where he’s having his wound tended to.  Figuring out how one of those scenes leads to the other is quite a task.  In other places, I nearly missed who shot the girlfriend/secretary, I still don’t know what happened with the attempted kidnapping, and I’m not sure why the car is destroyed in the junkyard.  Tokyo Drifter isn’t afraid to rush forward while challenging you to keep up.  Changes in camera angles challenge, too, like the sudden cut to overhead views when Tetsu is trapped in a pit and when the secretary is shot.  Or the noir-ish low-angle shot of the business meeting.  In another scene, we see Tetsu talking while leaning over a desk with some vague chair detail in the background.  After he talks awhile, he stands up and turns around, continuing to talk.  You do a double-take and see that he’s been pensively leaning on the desk and that the person he’s been talking to all along is, in fact, behind him.  There is a lot of such creative editing and camera work here, all the more surprising given how pre-MTV this film is.

Character development in the film is analogous to story development.  We see Tetsu assume a series of poses and attitudes, but we don’t see how he gets from one to the other.  Tetsu is in love, then he isn’t; loyalty suddenly looms large in the plot.  Just like we get two different scenes and must figure out the connection, we get a series of character attitudes and have to fill in the psychological blanks.

If, in fact, filling in the blanks is at all a concern here.  Tokyo Drifter could accurately be described as a series of ecstatic scenes put together with some exposition.  Suzuki gives us one strikingly-colored composition after another.  The hero wears his robin’s egg blue suit and white shoes throughout, and we’re treated to a series of brilliant sets in yellow, red and pink.  The bar is yellow, the meeting room fuchsia, and the office of building owner is decorated with classical imagery.  The final showdown occurs on an classically-inspired, abstract, white theater set with a large, oval sculpture that changes color as the action proceeds.  Tokyo Drifter is a series of such striking, abstract images.

The abstraction in the film is wonderful.  The highlight is the shootout at the conclusion.  By the time we finally get to this point, the film has even given up trying to create rooms.  We have some stairs that don’t go anywhere, a column that doesn’t support anything, a door with no room behind it and the color-changing abstract sculpture.  These are simply theatrically-lit stage props, and the action here is similarly stylized with something close to dance choreography.  I can hardly imagine what a B-film audience would have thought of this movie if they’d come in expecting a gangster flic. 

Or perhaps a Western.  Tokyo Drifter has many echoes of the Western.  Obvious links are ones like the name of the saloon – Western Saloon – and the typical brawl that erupts in it.  But Tetsu himself is also a Western hero, a tough guy who’s a good fighter.  In this character and others, Tokyo Drifter addresses the Western concern with defining masculinity.  Like in many Western films, the tougher a character is, the more masculine he is, and when Tetsu resists fighting, he’s seen as weak.  He earns his masculinity and the attendant respect by fighting.  Just as the film is concerned with honor, Tokyo Drifter comes to focus on loyalty.  Tetsu's character arc is from being a loyal protector of his boss to renouncing loyalty and becoming a wandering drifter, reminiscent of both the wandering samurai of other Japanese films and the Western hero.  The women here are from a Western, too, accessories to the men.  While we may root for Chiharu to win her man as she pursues him, we know that the real Western hero’s life is just going to be too hard for a woman.

Tokyo Drifter is thoroughly enjoyable, and it has distinctive links to films that followed it.  Although it’s easy to see Tarantino’s abstract violence (Kill Bill) and Jarmush’s stylization and color (Mystery Train), even films like Coppola’s One from the Heart and Scorcese’s New York, New York have some affiliation.  And it’s hard not to think of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s colors and abstraction in Diva, which also includes Asian gangsters and a character with a musical fixation.  Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter even provides some small context for Ohbayashi’s later, incredibly creative House.



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