Toru Murakawa’s elegantly horrific multiple-murder story, something of a Nippon Noir, is hard to classify, but easy to watch. Drawing you in without adding up right from start when a middle-aged detective and a younger/fitter man fight over a stolen police gun in the pouring rain. Shot from a distance, often at a high angle, the otherwise deserted sidewalk corner softly lit by street lamps to slightly obscure our view. It’s compelling without rhyme or reason. As is the following robbery and slaughter of a mob gang at a closed bistro/club where a table of partially stacked stolen yen waits to be distributed. Instead, after a rubout, the loot is destined to go home with our murderer where his high tech music room calms him down via Shostakovich & Mozart. And that’s before a concert in an arid modern concert hall for a strikingly charmless rendition of a Chopin piano concerto where our killer bumps into a woman he’ll meet again while holding up a bank. (More mass murder of tellers and execs.) Then pick-up a prostitute to masturbate in front of him while he relaxes with an alcohol slurpee. Yikes! What a strange film! It coninues in this vein, a partner comes on board and there’s a dandy cat-and-mouse game with another detective on a moving train, before ending with one of those it-was-only-a-dream wake-up calls at the end of the concert. (An old UFA trick Fitz Lang was partial to.) Except this too is a trick. Murakawa has something else in mind entirely. Revenge? Maybe. Explanations? Certainly not.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Murakawa brings revisionist flair to ‘80s ‘drop-out’ culture. Was that a thing in Japan at the time? Had me thinking back to the anti-genre/genre pics of Seijun Suzuki in the ‘60s. Both directors decades ahead of their time. Begin a Suzuki tour with YOUTH OF THE BEAST/’63, a true astonishment. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/youth-of-beast-1963.html
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