Nackt und verdammt

Based on a novel written by Tamura Taijiro, and is actually a remake of 1950 Toho film Escape at Dawn directed by Taniguchi Senkichi with stars Ikebe Ryo and Shirley Yamaguchi, director Suzuki Seijun transformed a Nikkatsu ready-made routine script with low budget and tight schedule into one of his finest arts. Without digressing from the script or the novel, he recreated his signature world that is abstractive and ideological. Even though this is a B-movie, or maybe because it is, Suzuki with the production designer Kimura Takeo displays fantastic backdrops using some painstaking techniques of visual effects, superb studio sets and location filming behind outstanding performances acted by Kawaji Tamio, Nogawa Yumiko and Tamagawa Isawo. Compare to the Escape that has altered some elements from the Tamura's original this Suzuki version is essentially true to it, therefore Suzuki version has quite important elements such as the prostitution in the Army, multiple stratum of knotty personae and complicated layers of grotesque psychological characterizations concomitant to their bizarre relationships all of that are omitted in the Taniguchi's "fine literary effort." Along with his sense of unique humor these deep feelings the film radiates might be inspired from his own war experiences as a soldier during the WW II and it could be said that, in this regard, some similarity might be in Samuel Fuller's, many of these films are also deeply affected by Fuller's own war experiences.

"Sunpu Den" is a film from director Seijun Suzuki is both anti-war and anti-prostitution, as it paints a bleak story of a young woman, Harumi. The story begins with Harumi being dumped by her boyfriend. In reaction, she volunteers to be a 'comfort woman' on the Japanese front lines in China. The comfort women were prostitutes provided by the government for the troops--and this small group of women are to satisfy the sexual needs of a thousand men! To make things worse, the Adjutant in charge is a brutal jerk who mistreats the women. Harumi hates him, though she later falls in love with this man's assistant. What happens next is a tragic waste of life and is an indictment of the Japanese war machine.

This is what you might call a 'feel-bad movie'. It is meant to be sad and awful and it is. The film is compelling viewing but isn't nearly as good as other Japanese anti-war films like "Burmese Harp" or "Fires on the Plain". Very good but not great.

Presumably one of the "movies that didn't make sense" that led Nikkatsu Studios to promptly fire Suzuki after BRANDED TO KILL, in the process turning him into an icon of artistic defiance that inspired may, STORY OF A PROSTITUTE is at the same time a war melodrama, a rather conventional love story that you could see come out from Hollywood in the 50's, but also a Seijun Suzuki film. A genre director who slaved away from b-movie to b-movie working from scripts that had little difference from one to the next, Suzuki developed, out of artistic frustration with the trappings of cookie cutter studio film-making, an irreverent visual grammar which existed for its own pleasure. In his own way, perhaps unwittingly, he was making New Wave before most.

Here we find both facets of his work, a crowdpleasing genre film and a sumptuous celebration of a visual cinema.

But unlike stuff like TOKYO DRIFTER, or indeed Branded to Kill, films that often appeared to be little more than empty exercises in stylish bravura where the only reward possible for the viewer was a confirmation of Suzuki's bold, audacious approach, Story has a dramatic heart. The director approaches the love story between Mirakami, an orderly to an abusive adjutant who is brainwashed to docile acceptance of military authority, and Harumi, a passionate prostitute working a Japanese camp somewhere in Manchuria in the days of WWII, with sincerity and honesty.

In the same time he punctuates the main plot with set-pieces that truly dazzle with their inventiveness. Harumi running through a shellshocked battlefield to an injured Mirakami; Harumi's fantasy of Mirakami rushing in slow-motion through a white-washed scene to save her from the abusive officer. All this filmed in stark black and white, with fast tracking shots around walls and behind wooden panels, beautiful exterior shots of Manchurian landscapes which dwarf the figures walking them, intricate framing in depth and poignant symbolic touches that give an almost existential air to proceedings.

Reviews of a Seijun Suzuki film tend to be dominated by discourse on the director's much-vaunted iconoclastic stylistics and Nikkatsu failure of vision in their treatment of him. While Suzuki's arrhythmic editing, bold use of effects, slow-motion, and emotive performances differentiate the film from the generic fare of the time, there is as much miss as hit regarding enhancement of narrative in Suzuki's helming.

Story of a Prostitute is about Harumi, a working girl cruelly dumped by her lover who takes vengeance by throwing herself into the grueling world of the so-called 'comfort women' servicing the Imperial Army in China. There she meets Mikami, an unreformed nationalist, and their ill-fated love plays out against a backdrop of WWII endgame.

Harumi is certainly a force, and her power, drive extremes of agony and ecstasy give her a powerful on-screen presence. She wails, uncontrollably, in close-up, a slow-motion shot no less, and the raw anguish is viscerally present. The fact that the situation she and Mikami find themselves in is hopeless drains the film of dramatic tension. The compensation is keenly observed characters who comment on their situation without finger-wagging. The absurdity of Japan's war effort is best captured by Ono, a deserter who takes up with the Chinese and preaches the 'dishonorable' credo that it is better to live. Officers spout that it is more dignified to die in battle for the Emperor, the irony being these are words spoken while sprawled drunk on the floor of a brothel. A Chinese prostitute whines that she is paid less than her Japanese counterparts. Soldiers drink, fornicate and hope they can make it to the next day. The landscape is almost lunar, begging the question of what, exactly, they are fighting for possession of.

The futility of war is an expertly painted background, but overshadowed by the melodramas of lives lived. Without Suzuki's unconventional approach this film would be quickly forgotten, but the camera movement, stark sets revealed in deep focus, and humanity and absurdity of the minor characters keeps this film fresh. Harumi is the embodiment of the will to live, if not exactly to live well. Having said that, the histrionics begin to grate after a while, and a stronger plot would raise this film to greater heights.

Neither a B-film nor a masterpiece, but simply another watchable outing from a unique filmmaker.

Most likely the closest Suzuki ever got to making a prestige film. It probably wasn't viewed as such at the time, as it was a remake of a movie called Escape at Dawn that was generally considered a classic at the time (it was scripted by Akira Kurosawa and directed by Senkichi Taniguchi in 1950). Story of a Prostitute seemed like a much more lurid version of the older film. Both were anti-war pictures, but Escape at Dawn was romantic and tragic. Story of a Prostitute is harsh and cynical. Its scenes are often comic, which clashes with the standard view of war. In an interview on the new Criterion disc, Suzuki, a veteran himself, says that he found a lot of black humor and absurdity in his wartime experience. All three of WWII-themed films I've seen from him, which cover the pre-war (Fighting Elegy), the actual war (Story of a Prostitute), and post-war (Gate of Flesh) periods all incorporate some level of absurd, black comedy. The three films actually make a good trilogy (the rest I've seen are all yakuza or crime films). Story of a Prostitute is a very powerful anti-war film, though it is lurid and not nearly as powerful as something like, say, Kobayashi's The Human Condition. Yumiko Nogawa, who also starred in Gate of Flesh, gives a fantastic performance. But it is, as usual, Suzuki's supreme visual skills – in black and white in this instance – that make the film a stunning and memorable experience. His artistic imagination in cinematographic matters is nearly unsurpassed in the entire realm of cinema.