Gohiki no shinshi
D:
Hideo Gosha. P: Gin’ichi Kishimoto, Masayuki Sato. W: Yasuko Ono, Hideo Gosha. Ph:
Tadashi Sakai. M: Masaru Sato. St: Tatsuya Nakadai (Oida), Mikijiro Hira
(Sengoku), Ichiro Nakatani (Fuyujima), Kunie Tanaka (Umegaya), Hisashi Igawa
(Motoki)
“We’re all condemned to death”
The
titles roll over a robbery sequence shot in negative, suggesting that
conventions are about to be inverted. What follows, however, is textbook film
noir, cultural differences notwithstanding: protagonist brought low in a
reckless moment; fateful encounters; a heist and subsequent betrayals; the promise
of redemption. There are seamy locales, squalid murders, sombre ruminations set
to mournful jazz, all filmed in high-contrast, expressionistic black and white in
a narrative fragmented by flashbacks.
This
is no mere exercise in box-ticking, however. It is put together with Gosha’s
usual panache, augmented by the social criticism that marked his previous
films, the chambara adventures Three Outlaw Samurai and Sword of the Beast. It is perhaps more
sober than the majority of titles in the nascent Japanese noir scene, where
Seijun Suzuki was the dominant force behind the camera, and Jo Shishido in
front. Arranging his characters against a background of economic uncertainty
and deterioration – few indications here of Japan’s post-war miracle – Gosha restricts
their room for manoeuvre, figuratively and visually, such that their options
are limited and their actions correspondingly desperate.
In
the first of 10 appearances for the director, Nakadai plays Oida, nearing the
end of a prison term for the accidental deaths of a man and his daughter in a
car crash. He befriends Sengoku, another inmate on the verge of release, who
offers him a proposition – a half-share in 30 million yen, and a hit list with
three names on it. Oida accepts uneasily. He is not cut out for killing. There
is no need: two trench-coated gangsters are stalking the same people – members
of a crew put together by Sengoku to snatch the proceeds from a drug deal. Sengoku
hid the money and wants to keep it for himself. Oida sees an opportunity to buy
back his soul, warning the men in turn – albeit to no avail – and taking under
his wing the newly orphaned daughter of the first victim.
Oida’s
odyssey is a classic noir-like descent into an urban netherworld stricken with physical
and moral decay. He skirts tawdry nightspots – a bar, a burlesque joint – and
meets his intended targets in lonely, out-of-hours locales – docks, an
amusement park. Like him they have fallen on hard times or never known anything
better – Motoki, an ex-cop, was drummed out of the force for consorting with a
mobster’s moll; Fuyujima was a boxer punished for refusing to throw a fight. Only
the treacherous Sengoku, with his dog-eat-dog mentality, and the relentless
gangsters, one of whom wields a deadly sharpened umbrella stick, are worthy of
contempt. The rest are sympathetic – loyal to their accomplices and loved ones,
despairing enough to gamble on Sengoku’s scheme.
These
are figures recruited from the socially aware school of noir, people drawn to
crime as a last resort or driven to the margins through no fault of their own. This
would include Oida himself and the widow of the man he killed, whom he finds
eking out a living in a nightclub (the writers resist the temptation to manufacture
a romantic relationship between them), as well as Motoki’s daughter, who
follows Oida like a puppy. Their scenes together are affecting rather than
cloying, and important in furnishing Oida (Nakadai guiding the character
discreetly from guilt-induced disengagement to passionate commitment) with a
renewed sense of responsibility and an emotional stake in the denouement.
Gosha’s
direction is energetic and imaginative. Chases and fights are covered from
unusual angles; characters are blocked by objects or boxed in – framed through
broken glass or chain-link fencing in metaphorical prisons. The choice of locations
is suggestive. Beyond the expected noir backdrops of drinking dens and alleyways,
there are scenes of violent death set in a water purification station, an auto
graveyard, a power station – this is industrialisation at its most brutally
impersonal, rendering individual struggles almost laughably insignificant. Kevin Grant
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