Kiga kaikyô

Living in thirty world we're already inured received too late those hidden worldwide gems that were recovered by latest advanced cleaning process of those old negative prints, in Kiga Kaikyô that means literally STRAITS OF HUNGER, in a polling by Japanese critics in 1999 reached in honorable third place, what an achievement got by Tomu Uchida, nonetheless this prize winner came on late period of his extensive career, this crime-cop-drama-mystery has a stained Noirish style and also has a slight hookup with French Novelle Vague.

This overlong production basically lays out in two main happenings carried out in September 20th 1947 in post war environment, firstly a heist of a large money held by three convicts followed by arson taking to death the pawnshop's wealthy owner, meanwhile a storm is near of the bay area ends up with a shipwreck of a ferryboat entailing in many hundred of deaths, those criminals harness the chaos installed on rescue to sneak away by boat, later just one of them Kakichi Inukay (Rentarô Mikuni) survives, aftermaths randomly meeting with a lovely-naïve pros.titute Yae Sugito (Sachiko Hidari), both having a heart sex night where the thief takes her a large amount of money.

Meanwhile the local policeman Yumisaka (Junzaburô Ban) sniffing around to find out a clue of those criminals, track down their footsteps, soon he reaches in Yae inquiring her over the running thief, in gratitude Yae alleges stayed the night with a dissimilar person, avoiding Yumisaka of the right track, at once the silly girl starts a kind of platonic love affair with the unknown Inukay, she ends up in Tokyo slum area, wondering one day should be meeting her do-gooder to be grateful for, it come in ten years after with tragic events unveiling hidden secrets from the past.

Awesome black & white Toei production, the slow paced narrative allowed to the viewers relish every single sequence on an everlasting journey of those power leading trio, an extensive and exhausting searching led by the tenacious cop, the platonic love of Yea keeping her alive even in hard old profession, and finally the early Inukay eroded by hunger nowadays try appease his guilty by generous donations addressed by inmates rehab program, also displays the hard hungry environment post WWII, a real portrait of this harder time.

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First watch: 2024 / How many: 1 / Source: DVD / Rating: 10.

Although very different from Tomo Ushida's other late films, with its hand-held cameras, fluid 'noir' cinematography and realistic style, this is one of his unquestioned masterpieces, on a level with any of his post-war work. The acting is superlative - especially from Sachiko Hidari as the cheap and touchingly simple prostitute unexpectedly caught up in somebody else's drama - the narrative is beautifully paced, and the film fully justifies its three hours' length.

Without being one of those Hollywood-style "message" cop-jobs, or anything like Kurosawa's flimsy imitations of same (he is beloved in the States because his films are consciously in their - comparatively limited - transatlantic style) Ushida's film is a compelling thriller, with the inexorable movement of a Greek tragedy such as 'Oedipus'. It is also a deeply absorbing meditation on guilt, retribution, poverty - and most surprisingly, what we might call "the wages of kindness".

This is not some silly procedural for infants, anymore than Sophocles's drama; but it is a great film, for anyone who cares to respect a master of the medium, and gives some thought to what they are watching. (The DVD available from DVDLady is very watchable, taken from an excellent French print, with good English subtitles.)

This film is long, predictable, and boring. There is no suspense, the plot is stale, and the police procedure is completely uninteresting. The acting and cinematography are good, but there are some primitive effects whose strangeness is sort of unsettling as intended, but have mostly a comic effect for modern Western viewers (the sex scene with a fingernail is perhaps the highlight of the film). As in most Japanese movies, the characters are ridiculously awkward at times, but apparently this is how Japanese behave in reality.

While the depiction of post-war Japan was interesting, it wasn't enlightening, and as with German accounts of WWII you get the feeling that what little suffering is depicted is exaggerated.

Fans of Japanese cinema might like this film, but I recommend you watch Pitfall (again) if you are short on time, because Kiga kaikyo won't be adding much to your life.

Sachiko Hidari ("Yae") is great in this film as the young geisha who shelters "Inukai" (Rentarô Mikuni) from a storm one night. Next morning he leaves her quite a sum of money - one that enables her to change her life, pay her debts - all whilst he disappears. That storm was actually a tornado that sank a local ferry boat. During that investigation, two unknown bodies are identified - and they are soon tied in with a fire that largely destroyed a local village where a robbery had taken place. Where had the money gone? Who killed the men? Many years later, "Yae" spots a photograph in a newspaper that she thinks might be her long lost benefactor and sets out to say thanks - with tragic consequences. It is a long film this, over 3 hours, but the clever - almost internecine - fashion in which the old and new stories are married together; the police investigations and the characterisations are carefully and fully crafted leaves us with quite a complex crime thriller. Now, sadly, what makes the thriller work so well is also what ruined the ending for me. It is flawed in so many ways as to make me want to shout at the screen. It's not that the ending itself is wrong, it is that the police procedures (remembering that there was little science involved in the process) are all just to convenient - far fetched, even. Still, this is a strongly paced, beautifully photographed piece of story-telling cinema that runs parallel narratives well and cohesively.

We're beating a dead horse if we begin to lament another lost treasure, another overlooked Japanese director who's yet to receive his dues. Uchida will have to queue up in a humongous line. The film canon, as we know it, as it's being taught to college kids in film classes, is written from a Western perspective and is so incomplete as to be near useless. It's safe to say we're living in the Dark Ages of cinema, in the negative time of ignorance, and that 100 years from now Straits of Hunger will feature prominently in lists of the epochal narrative films of the previous century. We may choose to keep honoring the Colombuses and pretend we invented paper or gunpowder, but film history will invariably reveal the pioneers.

But that's a matter of concern for the historian, the librarian of cinema who will undertake the thankless task of restoring in the ledgers some measure of order. What do we get from the discovery of such a film now, as mortals with a remote? On one hand it's the perfect illustration of a narrative cinema en route to modernism, from Kurosawa to Imamura, how it's concurrent with New Wave expression, aware of it but not ready for it. The illustration is transparent when the image turns negative in crucial scenes, it feels like we're standing on a brink of expression (one of many in this film).

This is mere technicality though, dry academic discourse. If we're so inclined, we can find measures of this in Uchida's previous films. The man was of Mizoguchi's generation but he had an eye for abstraction. We can play back to back the finale of Killing in Yoshiwara and Sword of Doom and see what we get, how the point of view shifts to within, how the external turmoil becomes a lucid image of a state of mind.

What really matters to me here though is, as Donald Richie describes it, the "working out of karma". It's become a tortured term over the years but we need to understand what karma is not. It's not fate, though it speaks of fatalism. It doesn't emanate from above, we are the agents. Translated from sanskrit (or pali) it means "action". Our past actions have brought us here, our present actions determine our future. Good or bad, karma sets in motion the cycle of suffering that binds all beings to this earthly prison.

This is a spiritual film then, but how does it pertain to some primal principle of the soul? The story of bad karma is common in Japanese lore, a man finds himself haunted by guilt demons of the mind for the misdeeds of the past. Usually in this type of film we're brought to the brink of an abyss, from there we can gaze below to the existential void. Most films daren't go further (that is, if we accept there is somewhere to go from there) but it's enough for me to experience this, it's a first awareness. Our reward is that view.

Straits of Hunger presents a complexity that opens up a yawning chasm when we come to stand at that brink.

Our man is unaware of wrongdoing until it's too late. Because no one would believe his story of how he didn't murder anyone to get ahold of so much money, he keeps it. The dawn of his bad karma comes from a punishing moral conundrum, from circumstances outside his control. Our protagonist gets to choose, a life in prison or a life of guilt. I like that we're watching the hapless fallguy dance to the cosmic tune of an indifferent god (more precisely, no god), but we should keep in mind this is not a noir text.

What's of essence here, is the acceptance of suffering. Our protagonist needs to atone for something he didn't want to be born into, a murderous scheme with two ex-convicts of which he was unaware. As we all do. Suffering then, like the first cry of the newborn, is a natural, inate, response to existence. Brilliant! I love how Uchida makes cinema out of that bad karma.

In a similar text, the Daibosatsu Toge, famously adapted by Kihachi Okamoto in '66 and Uchida himself in '71, the setting of the visitation is, of course, The Great Boddhisatva Pass (that is, from where the boddhisatvas pass or cross into this world, enlightened beings who choose to remain in the cycle of life and suffering to assist others in their path). Here it's a furious storm, a cataclysm.

For the first apparition of guilt, Uchida summons into the stage the portents of doom, rain and lightnings rolling down Mt. Fear, and a prostitute, the harbringer almost ceremonially covered in a blanket, mockingly bellows "there's no path out of hell". In a later scene he repeats the setup, to make a connection, but this time there is murder. What exists in the mind, will find its way out.

Inbetween, Uchida gives us one of the most vivid chronicles of life in postwar Japan to this day. The poverty and moral desperation of life in the slums and the black market, the Yankee resentment and political upheaval, but also a kind of hopeful anticipation for change. The contrast is subtle, and in the next segment we see our raggedy protagonist is now a successful businessman.

Two instances in the film fascinate me a lot, when the cop recites the sutra for the dead. The first time is nondescript, but when we hear it again in the finale we know. It foreshadows. And more, the cop knows the sutras better than a monk (as a monk tells him), the teachings, but he's not liberated. Ultimately no one is in the film, and the cycle of suffering goes on. This is one of the great Buddhist films for me.