October 1: Branded to Kill/Koroshi no rakuin (1967 -- Seijun Suzuki)

★★★★
If the Coltrane of his "Love Supreme" period had made a movie, it might’ve looked similar to Branded to Kill.  There’s a storyline that runs through the film, and we know we’re on that line at certain touchstone moments.  The film also has many parallels and repetitions that occur, giving us yet another line to follow through the film.  And there are occasional moments of intense stylistic beauty when everything stops for the sheer aesthetic pleasure of the viewer.  With all these elements of beauty, there is more than enough in Branded to Kill to hold us, but this isn’t a Classic Hollywood movie.

The main thrust of the film is fairly clear -- the work and love travails of a hit man – but our path through that story is jump cut and presented with gaps in causality and motivation.  Even in the beginning, Hanada picks up a car to do a job and finds a body in it.  We don’t know how or why the body is there, and the body isn’t important to the rest of the film.  In fact, it’s there in one scene and gone in the next with only a mention that it had been there.  Branded to Kill regularly introduces elements like this without explaining them or going on to use them, and the film jumps to circumstances with little explanation of how the characters got there or why.  Moves like these follow a logic of viewer pleasure rather than tight causality or temporal necessity.

The job that Yabuhara assigns Hanada is another example of this pleasure principle.  Hanada is to kill four different people, and we later learn that the victims were part of a plot to defraud Yabuhara.  However, that fraud is irrelevant to what has come before and what comes after in the film, and even though the Suzuki uses the job to introduce Hanada to Misako, Branded to Kill doesn’t need four hits for that.  Rather, the individual hits give Suzuki an opportunity for some visual riffs which include an assassination though a sink, a killing from behind a billboard with a moving part, and an escape atop a hot-air balloon.  The hits are visual fun for visual pleasure, improvisations on the main theme but certainly not integral to the storyline.

Another part of the pleasure here is the inconsequential repetition, which we certainly take note of but which bears little significance; the recurrences are less thematically important that they are fun to notice.  The butterfly, for example, would seem to have some significance since it’s the reason Hanada misses his victim on one of the hits, masking in the shape of butterflies fill part of the screen at another point, and Misako’s apartment is filled with dead butterflies.  Ultimately, though, these are just little moments of imagery that give viewers a thrill, a suggestion that an idea is in there somewhere.  Lighters, too, make frequent appearances: several smoking close-ups feature the smoker striking a lighter, and Hanada hides behind a moving lighter advertisement on one of his killings.  Again, it’s fun to notice this recurring image, but the thrill resides only in noticing.  And how many times do we see Hanada savoring the smell of rice?  Yet this fetish doesn’t figure in any important way in the movie.

Branded to Kill also has lines of script that seem to have some import.  As Kasugo drives Hanada and his new wife from the airport, we hear a conversation to the effect that the two most destructive things for a hit man are love and drink.  Soon after, a drunk Kasugo is killed while taking out the number four killer, Ko, and it seems the moral is set.  However, our good guy Hanada is soon madly in love with Misako, and he starts to drink about that same time.  Unfazed, Hanada still takes out several would-be assassins, so drink and love hasn't slowed him down.  And later, Hanada kills hit man number one but is killed by the man at the same time, a parallel scene to the one earlier in the film.  Clearly the law about alcohol and women isn’t proven as number one doesn’t have those weaknesses but dies anyway.  The moralizing and repetition here only serve to draw us in and give us titillating points that suggest but don’t lead to wisdom.

This is the beauty of the film.  Like a long, skillful jazz improv, Branded to Kill follows a narrative line while giving us delight and pleasure in its embellishments.  As long as the film moves like that, it’s a delight.  However, when the film becomes too predictable and too repetitious, it loses interest, awhich happens in the concluding quarter as Number 1 controls Hanada, beating him down psychologically and menacing death.  After the fast pace of the first part of the film, this section moves very slowly and very predictably with Number 1 first placing long calls, then moving into the apartment, then taking Hanada out with him.  The only problem with this film is that this section makes so much sense.  Otherwise, there’s more than enough imagination and pleasure in Branded to Kill to satisfy even the most jaded film-goer.