Retro Review by Joseph Bullock
At University I was lucky enough to take a semester dedicated to Japanese cinema. While I had seen a few of Akira Kurosawa’s films before, as well as Seijun Suzuki’s experimental Yakuza flick Tokyo Drifter (1966), I was new to all of the invigorating works that our lecturer showed. Finding the new wave (Nūberu bāgu) particularly interesting, I went home one night and watched Yoshishige Yoshida’s political epic Eros + Massacre (1969). I remember thinking that it was possibly the most beautifully composed film that I had ever seen. I understood almost none of it.
Pale Flower, on the other hand, was not just a movie I understood but one that I loved – and still do. Like Suzuki’s movies (though lacking his inimitable aura of bizarre self-destruction), it is a bold and deconstructive genre film. Its stylistic vocabulary is one inherited equally from Yakuza movies, existential cinema, and noir. What results is remarkably unique: a story of a disillusioned, misanthropic man becoming increasingly numbed to a landscape of isolation and violence; as well as images that stunningly evoke this world in its stark, rain-drenched textures.
Ryô Ikebe stars as Muraki, an aging criminal who has just been released from jail for the killing of a rival gang member. Upon release, he finds himself in an underworld rapidly shifting away from him: ties with other groups are being made, and new, dangerous figures populate the streets, bringing with them the threats of drug abuse and assassination. Undercutting one of the iconic tropes of the gangster genre, Muraki is not even keen to escape this setting. It is both the only place that he has ever existed in and the one that will probably kill him. He is too tired to leave.
Many great filmmakers have had the compulsion to explore the outlaw lifestyle through a more pragmatic, occasionally absurd lens. The distant, static shots of Muraki smoking in his apartment are easily comparable to those of Alain Delon’s hitman in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï. Elsewhere, gang leaders distribute melon slices and ponder on whether or not to go fishing. The sole exception in this impassive narrative is the character of Seiko (Mariko Kaga), an enigmatic and thrill-seeking young woman who only partially fulfils the role of the femme fetale. She takes our protagonist’s interest but never actively seeks to harm him.
If there is any violence or danger associated with their relationship it is that of gambling, which itself mirrors and strengthens the addictive quality of their love. In contrast to the unstable hand-held shots of the movie’s opening, which position an angsty, disillusioned Muraki questioning the contingency of modern life, the gambling scenes are patient, conveying in their terseness a wealth of emotions. The drive of the game is revealed to be a drive of self-destruction, and the competition between Seiko and Muraki as well as their mutual lust helps to intensify this fraught, impossible ambition.
That Shinoda finds a lucid and evocative vocabulary through which to film these games is a testament to his imagination as well as to the meticulous artistry of his wide Shochiku Grandscope frames. Alongside birds-eye-view shots that emphasise abstract beauty and rigid mathematical logic, he uses infrequent, startling whip-pans to signal shifts in conflict. There is an instability to the central relationship which is also present more generally; these characters seek in their lives a series of short-lived highs to offset the disquieting lack of meaning that they find in the real world.
In comparison to the great works of other directors of the new wave such as Nagisa Oshima and Hiroshi Teshigahara, Shinoda’s most famous films can often appear less experimental (their narratives are easily comprehensible at least). Despite this, both Pale Flower and his masterpiece Double Suicide (1969) feature show-stopping scenes of fractured, dreamlike imagery with bewildering and subversive implications. The latter goes so far as to destroy the sets of its theatrical framing, jarringly realigning the audiences’ gaze. This example however is more a performance of Muraki’s anxieties, an expressionistic rendering of his subconscious.
The dream shows him navigating a confusing environment to eventually find Seiko with Yoh, a strange assassin who has previously tried to kill him. Muraki’s total lack of control is visualised through his illogical movements as well as an unsettling slow-motion shot that dollies inward, gradually becoming more and more claustrophobic. He approaches huge doors and odd, porthole-like windows that suggest to us a man lost in a sea of mere shapes. It would be callous not to mention here the effect of composer Toru Takemitsu’s extraordinary score, which combines swelling, dissonant brass motifs and extended silences to reinforce this undercurrent of horror and disarray.
In the very first scene of the film, Muraki narrates in a mode deeply evocative of the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre: “Why are so many people crammed into cage-like boxes?,” he says, going on to call people “strange animals.” The chaos of living in an environment of completely random actions – a place without God and therefore without prescribed meaning – has become a form of disgust. In contrast to this outlook, he views the murder that he is hired to commit as something fatalistic, an unchangeable aspect of his life.
The movie’s interplay of freedom and entrapment is highly responsible for its pessimistic tone and delicate pacing. The story structure is minimalistic for a gangster film, featuring one climactic kill amongst a series of loose interactions and meandering conversations. Everything is cyclical. Muraki and Seiko fail to create a narrative that drives their lives, and so Pale Flower never obscures this. It is fortunate that Shinoda’s aesthetic boldness and imaginative scenarios convey these themes in such a compelling, singular fashion. It is part of his genius that these existential questions fit so perfectly with how the gangster genre presents human experience and freedom, culminating in a disruptive and psychologically complex ode to cinema’s favourite brand of antihero.