by Victor Pryor
The New York Asian Film Festival ran from June 26 to July 11. For more details on the awesomeness that you missed, click here.
WOLVES PIGS AND MEN (1964)
Twice now in the Festival, Kinji Fukasaku has proven himself to be a master of underworld explorations. So it comes as little surprise that his stab at noir is as intense and satisfying as it winds up being. Since America had shifted from detectives and gangsters to spies and gentleman thieves, it fell to Japan to carry on the grand tradition.
Of course, a noir coming from a country that was partially obliterated by atomic weapons is, more likely than not, going to skew a wee bit darker than in the west.
“Don’t expect sunshine and lollipops” is the takeaway here…
The story revolves around three brothers, each at various levels of status in the crime game. Newly released convict Jiro just wants out; baby brother Sabu is the young and hungry leader of a gang of would-be anarchists; and eldest Kuroki has pretty much gone corporate.
Unlike Fukasaku’s later Yakuza epics, the machinations of Wolves, Pigs and Men are relatively contained and easy to follow. Jiro gets involved in a plot to steal 40 million from the big boss Iwasaki, and enlists the aid of Sabu and his gang to act as decoys for a mere 50,000 each. There is the inevitable double cross, and Jiro and Sabu (as well as Kuroki, who is, for all intents and purposes, in league with Iwasaki) must determine the limits of familial obligation. Spoiler alert: they’re pretty damn limited.
Family is, obviously, a major undercurrent of the film. Sabu resents his brothers, who left him to take care of their ailing mother. Kuroki sees them as the physical incarnation of the destitute background he is desperate to distance himself from (the nightclub he’s looking to open through the patronage of Iwasaki is called the ‘Bar Phoenix’. Which is… not subtle). And Jiro’s connection to his family is… ambiguous, at best.
But the larger theme is youth versus experience. Sabu and his gang play at being nihilists, but for all their talk (to say nothing of singing and dancing) about how horrible their world is and how doomed they all are, they still betray hopes of getting theirs. And when the brown stuff hits the fan (as it must), they believe their loyalty to one another will keep them safe.
This puts them in direct contrast with their elders, who built the system that keeps the next generation down, and by virtue of that, has a vested interest in keeping it in place. Time and victory have led them to believe that the way they work is merely an extension of the way the world is supposed to work. They’ve so distanced themselves from the reality of what they do that they almost seem to believe it’s all business.
If nothing else, Sabu seems tear the roof off that facade once and for all.
Finally, riding the fence like a true noir anti-hero is Jiro, who would just as soon wash his hands of the whole thing. Unlike Sabu, who is loyal to his friends, or Kuroki, who is loyal to the system, Jiro’s only loyalty is to his own dreams of escape, making him the proverbial wild card.
(Though the real wild card here is actually Mizuhara, Jiro’s bespectacled, sadistic, patently untrustworthy partner in crime. He’s the sort of love-to-hate character that one salivates to see get his comeuppance… which, with noir, isn’t always a guarantee…)
That all this meaty thematic stuff and character work plays second fiddle to shootings, chases, a brilliantly shot heist sequence, and some remarkably grisly torture is… well, that’s what noir is all about, isn’t it?
Despite a retro (if catchy) jazz score and some ’60s era “modern” camerawork, Wolves, Pigs and Men feels oddly contemporary and even after half a century, hit with an impact that’s difficult to dismiss. But let’s put all that aside.
When all is said and done, there’s only one question that truly needs answering:
Yes, but is it cool?
Yes. Wolves, Pigs and Men is very, very cool.
CHASUKE’S JOURNEY(2015)
The idea behind Chasuke’s Journey could very easily be the basis for a hilarious comedy. And at times, it’s a very funny film. But what makes it special is how writer/director Sabu explores the consequences of the world he set up to their fullest potential. And in so doing, he creates a comedy with more on its mind that mere postmodern hi-jinks.
Imagine a world where the mythological threads of fate have been replaced by scrolls, written by angels, that tell the life story of every human on the face of the Earth.
Now imagine that the angels were all a bunch of hacks.
Due to their lazy, poorly planned out efforts, the people living in the world of Chasuke’s Journey are beset with melodramatic tragedies and lives that share unsettling similarities to hit movies.
The titular Chasuke serves tea to the angels, and harbors a crush on Yuri, one of the many who are subject to heavenly contrivance. When one of the angels fixates on killing her in a particularly senseless act of violence, Chasuke descends to Earth to rewrite her fate.
All of which sounds perfectly on target for, say, an early 2000s high concept Jim Carrey vehicle. Or (Heaven forbid) just imagine what Adam Sandler would do with a setup like that. There’s something perversely entertaining about the idea of a character going to war against his own narrative, but again: in the wrong hands, it could go very badly.
So all the credit in the world goes to Sabu (no relation to the fictional character from Wolves, Pigs And Men) for using it as a launching pad for an inquiry into the dual natures of fate and storytelling.
As it turns out, the “Rescuing Yuri” aspect of the story resolves itself fairly quickly, as the film has far bigger fish to fry. The real bulk of the movie follows Chasuke as he discovers the consequences of living outside of the world’s narratives. Does his “power” grant him a certain responsibility to those at the mercy of forces they can’t even hope to understand? And how long can he remain apart from the story when the story begins to revolve around him?
Profound questions, those. And Sabu, adapting his own novel, gives them the level of consideration that they deserve.
As he revealed in a highly informative Q&A after the film, Sabu wrote said novel solely for the purpose of turning it into a film; apparently it’s extremely difficult for original movies not adapted from a previous source material to get made these days.
(Japan: so like us…. *sigh*)
But perhaps the key to understanding Sabu’s game is in his response to an audience member who asked him whether or not the director is God:
“It starts that way, but the percentage goes down as things go on.”
Which is pretty much what happens in the movie, as Chasuke’s ability to course correct the narrative does, for all intents and purposes, make him a god. But as Heaven (as represented on Earth by the truly eerie “White Faced Cop”) seeks to maintain the status quo, the question becomes who is actual in control of the story? More to the point: is control even possible?
All of this high falutin’ postmodernist grad student type of talk might be obscuring the more salient point that this is a very entertaining film. In my rush to applaud the clever meta aspects, I haven’t given proper credit to the fun side characters like Maiko the game show host with an absurdly convoluted childhood trauma, or Joe, whose life story is one of the best gags in the entire picture. Nor have I said much about the charmingly winsome Yuri herself, played by the delightful Ito Ohno.
But that’s how deep the pleasures of Chasuke’s Journey run: it’s a movie too full of ideas and life and energy to be summarized so easily.
It doesn’t go where you think it will, and despite its ambitions, it never sacrifices its desire to entertain.
Which is how good storytelling is supposed to work.
Here on Earth, at any rate…
