Anrakkî monkî

Honestly...I don't know what the hell this film was about. It took me three sittings to get through it, and although it started off strong, it went in so many different directions, I couldn't really make heads or tails of it...

Some dude robs a bank (against his better judgement...) and ends up accidentally stabbing a chick in the process. From here on out, we follow this guy around, intertwining with other parallel tales of some Yakuza members, environmental actionists, and some other stuff...

I was really feelin' this one in the beginning as an off-beat, dark-comedy, but then it got slow and too serious, and then weird again - and reminds me of what I don't like about Japanese films - they're oftentimes too quirky to get anything from. At times, UNLUCKY MONKEY is down-right funny, at other times stone-cold-sober. At about the half-way point, I just lost interest. Not a bad film per se...but I've gotten to the point that I'm getting pretty burned out from pretty much everything currently coming out of Japan at this point...6.5/10

I find this film fascinating for several reasons.Its the only Sabu film with social conscience,for one.Then,its the film where the human is shown from the darkest point of view,without the unnecessary violence.There is some violence,but its not graphic nor without reason. The dream scene is one of the deepest and best I have seen and it stuck inside me as well as the ending(and I hope it did with others too).

The ending is a bit hard to understand for some.Why does the dead man rise?Why does Tsutsumi's character so desperately try to end his life?Maybe because he has seen more than others and knows that this society is going towards the end.Its disturbing I know and thats why this film is so precious to me.Sabu cared,thats why he made it.This is not just another of his mad stories with weird plots and a sad ending.

The ending I don't find really sad and thats another reason why I love it.He found relief.What I found sad and heavy to watch is the scene where he wanders through the filthy streets and knows that he is truly lost.The beginning gives you an insight to why he really is lost.He tried to commit that robbery because it was a chance for him to get a better life.Maybe he wanted to move away from all that.And then found himself stuck right in the middle of it all.Its the last tale of human hell and the desperate road to redemption.Sabu,you really are a master. Shinichi Tsutsumi became my favorite actor after this film.He really is a special talent and a gift to Japan's film industry.I hope he will have a long and fruitful career.Without him,this film wouldn't be what it is,a Dante-ish tour de force.

Unlucky Monkey / Anrakkî monkî (1998) is the 3rd film by writer-director Hiroyuki Tanaka (aka 'Sabu') who, over seven features, has established himself as one of Japan's leading comedic directors, establishing a growing reputation overseas. Eschewing the over-familiar repetitions of Nippon's best known big screen humorous series (the interminable but vastly popular Tora-San), or the startlingly prodigious range of a director like Takashi Miike, Tanaka has created an immediately recognisable filmic universe of his own. Characteristically based around such concerns as the calamities of fate, the humorous treatment of Japanese social interractions, and a typically satiric treatment of Yakuza, his stories often feature surreal, casually-cruel chains of events, as characters are tossed and turned about on fate's whims and left to an uncertain future. In his world, plots are intertwined, coincidences are common, ironies rife. Add this to a firm sense of cinematic pacing (often on a low budget) with a willingness to disrupt reality to achieve artistic purpose, and you have a director whose quirky films can be addictive.

At the heart of Unlucky Monkey are the fated perambulations of small time crook Yamazaki, played by Shinichi Tsutsumi. Tsutsumi is already an established member of Sabu's repertoire of actors, having previously appeared in Postman Blues / Posutoman burusu (1997), Dangan Runner / Dangan Ranna (1996) and perhaps most memorably, in the stylish Monday (2000). Expert in expressing stunned disbelief, in the present film he spends a good deal of time running or shuffling along in monologue, with words which range from his suggestions of the true nature of bravery at the start of the film, onto pathetic self-exoneration before ending with mute foreboding and resignation.

Yamazaki's attempt to rob a bank with a colleague is bungled from the start when he discovers that the place has just been raided by similarly clad villains. After acquiring the loot by default while on the run he then, almost as accidentally, commits a stabbing. At the close of a memorable opening sequence and these two momentous turning points in his hero's fortune, Sabu fills the screen (in English) with the main title, slowly scrolling up the name. Far from being 'lucky', after acquiring such a large windfall Yamazaki will eventually wish himself dead. And, like a monkey on rope, he is obliged to go where his master - fate - leads him. Connected by cause and effect to Yamazaki's woes is the sublot featuring a trio of second-rate yakuza, also responsible for an accidental fatality, their increasingly bumbling attempts to save their skins, and those other gangsters after them. Eventually the two main threads combine in a showdown finale.

It's a film full of crazy coincidences and ironic recognitions: Yamazaki's initial dealings outside the bank and following encounter with the girl, then the peculiar chain of events by which he ends up holding her funeral urn in a hearse for instance, or the passing of the ubiquitous ski-mask from various characters; the unconscious burial of loot and yakuza chief side by side, and so on. At one point, in a scene oddly reminscent of Hitchcock's The Thirty Nine Steps, Yamazaki escapes his persecutors off the street, blundering into a resident's meeting. At the gathering he delivers an impromptu and impassioned speech about the collapse of the Japanese dream and the destruction of the environment. A lot of this is satirical and far fetched (though it does set up a memorable dream sequence). Sabu doesn't care and, ultimately a sympathetic viewer will judge, it doesn't matter. The director is not after a sensible recreation of reality. His films' narratives regularly create an outrageous momentum of their own, one in which strange logic becomes its own justification. The tableau of main characters assembled at the end of Unlucky Monkey is both thus crazy and pithy at the same time, a bizarrely formal confrontation miles away from the regular climatic shoot-outs of asian crime dramas .

There are other remarkable scenes. Standout is Yamazaki's stunned encounter with the just self-disinterred Yakuza, a figure who is seemingly just as unkillable as the hero, edging down the street. Or the memorable bar scene, where an assassin first shoots himself accidentally in the groin, then drags his dying body bloodily across the floor to try and hit his targets now cowering in the toilet. Such a moment, full of pitch black humour, anticipates the gore of Ichi the Killer / Koroshiya 1 (2001), a film in which Sabu appeared as an actor.

For those who have yet to discover Sabu, Unlucky Monkey is as good a starting point as any, although it lacks some of the polish of his other films. For those who already relish the peculiar world of such an individual writer-director then it will prove unmissable. One dreams of Sabu one day directing a major talent like the deadpan Takeshi Kitano (whose own efforts at comedy such as Getting Any?/ Minnâ-yatteruka! (1995) have been uneven), when his Keatonesque world vision would surely reach new levels. In the meantime, this little gem can be strongly recommended

I'm far from an expert on Japanese films, so my ideas here are probably sophomoric, but here's my view. The film interweaves two main story lines, each fate-driven to collide with a host of peripheral dramas or mini-universes: an environmentalist meeting, a bum in an alleyway, a cocktail waitress on her way home, a professional hit-man hallucinating in a park, a family on its way to cemetery, etc. And each intersection of the main story lines with themselves, or with the peripheral story lines correlates to some specific dramatic style or phase: tragedy, melodrama, Chaplin-esque slapstick, crime thriller, philosophic, and, in the end, Twilight Zonish (or "Return of the Mummy"-ish). Afterall, the "unlucky monkey" is all humanity.

Each flip from one style or phase to the next is transitioned - unfortunately so, to my taste - not by a fade or short black-screen, but by a very excessive stop- or slow-motion study of some ultimate moment. These transitions so wore on my patience that I pressed fast-forward to escape. But even in fast-forward, I found them annoyingly long and static.

In imposing those transitions on us poor viewers, as though infatuated with what he thought some original and arty technique, the director was frankly destructively self-indulgent and probably deaf to whatever free-minded advisers he had during editing. I can't imagine another monkey on this planet with patience enough to sit through them - unless intended as mini-intermissions for making a few phone calls, mixing some lemonade and making some popcorn before returning.

With very little editing, this could have been a really good flick. Acting, scenery and artistic direction are good, and the environmentalist meeting sequence is among the most hilarious I've ever seen.

I saw this movie a few days ago, but the memories have already kind of faded. Therefore I guess that it wasn't such a memorable experience as it seemed to be during the time of watching it.

The opening sequence, where a bag of money changes hands several times in an elegantly choreographed series of accidents is probably the best scene of the movie in my eyes.

After that, it wasn't really clear to me whether I was watching a comedy, a yakuza crime flick or a splatter film.

The movie in itself has several parallel storylines that crisscross from time to time, nothing unusual, mixed with the Japanese way of hinting at emotions very blatantly, in itself nothing unusual either, but the constant shifting between comedy, crime, philosophy and gore was a bit too inconsistent for my taste.

However, if you like Japanese movies based around the topics Yakuza, Identity-Loss, Action and Slapstick, you might wanna give it a try.

6/10