Koroshi no rakuin

A bizarre yakuza flick with a taste for over-the-top visuals and modern stylistics, Branded to Kill follows the strange day-to-day existence of an expert hit-man who carries out his orders with steely determination and impassive cool. All hell breaks loose, however, when a butterfly alighting on his rifle scope results in a botched job -- and a death sentence for the screw-up. Joe Shishido, with his collagen-enhanced cheekbones, makes a terrific anti-hero whose unusual quirks (Suzuki reasoned that a man obsessed with the scent of warm rice would signal to audiences that this guy was quintessentially Japanese) instantly endear him to newly-made fans. Branded to Kill is wild fun, and has been favorably and frequently compared to the work of artists as different as John Woo and David Lynch -- which makes it all the more exhilarating when you realize it was made in 1967.

Branded to Kill is by far Suzuki's best film. It is my personal favorite crime film. Joe Shishido in his role as Hanada Goro, with his dark black sunglasses and Mauser M712 is one of the coolest characters ever created. The movie has everything, violence, shootouts, car chases, sex, and much much more. The film would likely have been shot in color, however Seijun Suzuki was prohibited from shooting in color due his wild use of colors in past films. The film is still a work of art, and looks beautiful in black and white. The best way I can describe this film is maybe a cross between Alfred Hitchcock and Sergio Leone. An excellent crime thriller not to be missed.

Seijun Suzuki has a lot of nerve as a director, and I mean that as complimentary as it can sound. He pushes buttons without being too exploitive- he knows the genre by the back of his hand, has likely seen his share of 40s film noir and gangster pictures, and knows at least a little of the French new-wave (or rather seems to carry over a similar spirit). So he knows also, even more crucially, how to turn the genre on its head while keeping a sense of poetry to the proceedings. It's hard to pull off a sense of the poetic in a crime film, but Suzuki's camera techniques are to the quality that he can get his actors at the same level of a challenge of sorts. Branded to Kill is about deconstructing the myths of the hit-man, the qualities of emotion and subservience, of duty and sacrifice, the coldness, and the suppressed longing for death that is encompassing. And damn if it isn't a helluva lot of fun as pulp entertainment, a tale told with some strange characters and even stranger twists of fate, and loaded to the gills with sex and violence.

That last part, I might add, is important in seeing Branded to Kill in context forty years ago. Who else but Suzuki, and maybe Arthur Penn, would go for this level of bizarre violence and uncompromising sex at the time, and at the same time not turn it into some kind of B-movie spectacle? Come to think of it, the premise and essential plot is pure B-movie: a hired killer, Hanada, aka #3 (Jo Shishido, very bad-ass even as he goes crazy), is very good at his job, so good that he's able to kill #2 in a big shoot-out scene in the first twenty minutes of the film, as he escorts another gangster around. Coming back from that mission, he gets a ride from mysterious Misako (Anne Mari), who gives him a mission to kill someone for her. But it goes bad, he's kicked out of the syndicate, and now will be killed by his old bosses. This problem is broken up by two things: 1, #3 is so good, even under total stress from his girlfriend Mami trying to kill him ("We're beasts", she says to him crying her eyes out in supposed guilt), he kills all of those who are supposed to kill him; and 2, he meets killer #1- the "Phantom" killer, who will soon kill him...'soon' being the dreaded word.

Well, as 'pure' as it can be under the circumstances anyway. It's essentially the story of an assassin who has the tables turned on him, and has to step up to the challenge- will he be #1? Can there ever be any kind of #1 in the world of hired killers? The last half hour is mostly only #3 and #1 in the apartment, as they both reach for their guns at the same time and neither uses them. It becomes a game of psychological torture (not to mention nerves), which reaches a fever pitch by the time the climax at the gymnasium comes around. But around this genre story we get Suzuki's style as a director, which is startling, provocative, tawdry, and surreal, whatever one could think to call it. Over the opening credits we see a tiny light go over the names, and the first shot is a random airplane image. There's plenty of indelible images from the film- killer #2 running out of the building on fire; the uproarious, delirious moths and lines and other figures that #3 sees around him at one point; the simple sight of our hero smelling his beloved rice, his first love; Misako in close-up staring at the killer in the rain- chillingly performed by Anne Mari like she's just got out of electro-shock- telling him her hatred of men and her lack of fear for death.

But around these images Suzuki is confident at casting his torn and frayed #3 killer (Jo Shishido gives the performance of a career, with him getting better as the film goes on and he's put in more surreal circumstances), and at being a master of compositions. He and DP Kazue Nagatsuka put just the right lift of suspense and danger to scenes, like the drunken gangster taunting to be shot in the tunnel, or #3 being told he'll be killed the first time and laughing it off, or even the near sci-fi-style of shooting the sides of the buildings. There's maybe a reason, aside from the perverse attention to dark comedy and weird drama in the proceedings, that the producers decided to fire the director after seeing his finished cut: he doesn't follow the rules, or whatever the rules might be in so much practice going into the norm, for shooting a traditional gangster film. Why not just keep the camera still on the whole building as a man falls to his death from the top? Or how about as our hero is on the phone we're seeing most of what's above his head in the apartment, then shifting below? It's a risk that Suzuki takes, to make the style reflect atmosphere of the urban landscapes, on top of that of the terrors facing #3, and only once or twice looking too self-conscious. In a word, it's hip.

It's probably not surprising then that the speed and energy and form of the style feels influential to so many who skate that line between mainstream and art-house, while at the same time doesn't feel aged at all. If anything, the sex is still hot, the sudden violence still shocking (and shockingly funny), and the ending as perfect a sum-up of the devastation of the ego of violence and death, the monstrosity of it, as could be imagined. I love it, in all its subtle, crazy independent wide-screen glory, and it serves as a great introduction to Suzuki's oeuvre.

Rice-sniffing, #3 Killer, dead butterflies, snuff films. Where to start? 'Koroshi no rakuin' is a surreal, Kafkaesque, timewarp of a film masquerading as a stylish 60's hit-man movie. Nikkatsu Studios fired Seijun Suzuki over this film's "incomprehensibility."

Suzuki is an auteur of the highest magnitude, nobody has ever used a widescreen, black and white, "Nikkatsu Scope" frame quite like him. The dense and beautifully chaotic images are overwhelming on your first viewing, it's the sort of movie that shows you something new every time you watch it.

Essentially Hanado Goro (Jo Shisido) is the yakuza's #3 Killer, but he desperately wants to be #1. As might be expected, being a hired gun is a stressful life and Hanado takes the edge off with lots of sex and the smell of boiling rice. The sex gets him embroiled in some sort of a plot and he finds himself getting much better acquainted with #1 Killer than he'd ever wanted to be.

Time backs up, swirls around, restarts, slows down. Major themes include, but are not limited to: ambition, lust, rivalry, bureaucracy, addiction, loss of self-control. There's a certain parallel in that with this picture Suzuki derailed his own career as a "salary man" making Nikkatsu yakuza flicks, many of Hanado's thoughts and impulses must have been the director's own.

Much has been made of how weird and off-beat Branded to Kill is. However it is important to consider it as part of Suzuki's progression through film-making. Before you can break the rules, you have to master them. Suzuki did so in several of his earlier pictures, from Underworld Beauty to Tattooed Life. And every time he was called to deliver a run of the mill yakuza flick, he infused it with his personal style. More and more he fractured the visual language of cinema every time, until he got rid of it or transformed it into a psychotic beast for Branded to Kill, revealing what lies beneath.

A plot synopsis would read something like this: Jo Shishido is killer Number #3 with ambitions of becoming Number #1. Who is Number #1? Does he even exist? That is until he's called to transport a client safely. The borders between realism and surrealism blur hopelessly at that point and what follows is a nightmarish concoction of beautiful set-pieces that lead up to his final confrontation with Number #1.

Saying that Branded to Kill is weird is an understatement. In turns fascinating, confusing, nonsensical, surrealist, psychotic, thrilling, poetic, nightmarish, confusing, tiring, mind-numbing and exhilarating, it defies description as much as it defies sense. The boundaries of time, space and logic are blurred and all you can do is experience the ride. It doesn't try to make much sense and apparently Suzuki made it up as he went along. The result was to be fired by Nikkatsu Studios for delivering a picture that "made no sense". I don't blame them really. Studios are businesses and Branded to Kill is not a movie with massive appeal. Ahead of its time in that aspect.

Filmed in beautiful black and white, with a languid jazzy score and a film-noir ambiance, Branded to Kill will certainly appeal to people with strange tastes. Don't go in expecting a yakuza action flick (although there are several gunfights and enough action to go along) or you'll be sorely disappointed. As an indication of the uncharted territories Branded to Kill's treads, I'll guesstimate that fans of Eraserhead-era Lynch, Koji Wakamatsu and Singapore Sling's style will appreciate it. I can't say "like it", because ultimately that's between the viewer and Branded to Kill to sort. Either way, it has to be experienced at least once. Just sit back and let the surreal absurdity of it all wash over you...