• 殺しの烙印 (Branded to Kill)

2/14/21 (Sun)

The notorious director Suzuki Seijun has essentially torn his 1967 movie into pieces, thrown them into the air, and spliced them together wherever they landed. It’s as if Picasso and Dali were fighting for the same brush. This is a big inside joke for fans of yakuza flicks, an irritation to the rest of us.

Hanada (Shishido Jo) is ranked Japan’s #3 assassin and harbors ambitions of taking over from the mysterious #1. Unfortunately he bungles a job when a butterfly lands on his gun, causing him to kill an innocent man. That means he has to be eliminated, and the mob is after him. He manages to outwit them but now has to face #1 himself (Nanbara Koji). In a particularly bizarre sequence in a movie full of them, #1 emerges from the shadows but, rather than kill Hanada right away, seeks to toy with him and play with his mind, such as forcing Hanada to link arms with him whenever they move – the hilarious shock of the delivery man at the sight of the two arm-in-arm would probably be un-PC today. This leads ultimately and unsurprisingly to a showdown.

It’s a movie only critics could love. It’s disjointed, illogical and self-indulgent, and the narrative, such as it is, is irrelevant to the outrageous imagery that runs from start to finish. It jumps around in time and space, making it difficult to know what the heck the director is getting at. He is apparently playing on the conventions of the yakuza genre, such as the hard-drinking assassin, the enigmatic female lover and so forth, while exaggerating them to the nth degree, including some wild sex scenes that must have given the studio apoplexy. He has fun with the idea of a #3-ranked assassin who gets off on the smell of rice, the dead butterflies pinned to the woman’s wall (pinned butterflies also played a key role in Terayama Shuji’s stage classic La Marie-Vison that same year; must have been something going around), the impossible gunfights, the absurd mind games by #1, the noirish setting – he takes every convention he can think of and turns it inside out without ever bothering to drop hints of a coherent plot or believable characters. He strips out the fillers and just puts in the highlights, leaving to us to fill in the blanks.

The expressionistic images intentionally call attention to themselves for better or worse, but they were certainly memorable, down to the last amazing sequence in the boxing arena. Hats off to the cinematographer. It’s hard to take chipmunk-faced Shishido seriously as a tough guy (he apparently had collagen implants to puff his cheeks out), though to be fair there’s no suggestion that he’s supposed to be taken seriously in the first place. The Indo-Japanese actress Mari Annu is striking as the exotic woman who wants Shishido for her butterfly collection, but her acting is as deliberately (I think) exaggerated as the rest of the cast.

The random set of images was not entirely uninteresting but feels lazy, as if the director didn’t want to take the time to do anything so dreary as to lay out a story. I presume Suzuki was trying to be shocking, but this fragmented style is ultimately just a lot of loose ends that lead nowhere. He was supposedly a big influence on other filmmakers, inevitably including Tarantino, but that’s not enough to make me want to watch his other films.