La femme tatouée

My review was written in March 1983 at the New Directors/Film Series in a Midtown Manhattan screening.

"Irezumi -Spirit of Tattoo" is an unconvincing and tedious Japanese film using the tattooing ritual as a springboard for tortured passion and corny plot twists. Obvious fest film fest fodder (where seriousness of tone is often confused with art), picture's U. S. import chances are nil.

Initial story premise, adapted by scripter Chino Katsura from a Baku Akae novel harks back to silent-era melodrama (e.g., Tod Browning's 1927 "The Unknown", wherein Lon Chaney Sr. Had his arms amputated to please his neurotic lover Joan Crawford). Librarian heroine Akane (Masayo Utsunomiya) agrees to have her back elaborately and painfully tattooed over a two-year period to satisfy her boss and lover Fjuieda (Yuhsuke Takida), who has a tattoo fetish in addition to his "beauty of a woman's skin" fetish.

Akane is presented as a willful character, but what she sees in the nondescript and bossy Fujieda is never explained or demonstrated. Picture segues instead to its main emphasis upon the tattooist Kyogoro (Tomisaburo Wakayama) who has evolved a peculiar method of his art requiring the woman to be made love to while being tattooed. Amidst much portentous mumbo-jumbo about "living tattoos" and the implication of the art, the viewer is treated to bloody closeups of simulated tattooing and standard softporn genre closeups of Akane groaning with a mixture of pain and pleasure.

Heavy-handed direction by Yoichi Takabayahsi demonstrates almost no narrative skill: every plot detail and twist is first introduced with an emphatic camera movement or racking of focus before its revelatory repetition later, and story periodically halts for a reel of two of lame duck, illustrated flashbacks. Overall effect is akin in a silent film where the dramatic content is developed in the inter-titles rather than through the shots and montage.

By the time the last plot shoe drops, story structure resembles a timid incest film, in which ech of the six main characters is multiply intertwined with one another via blood or sexual relations: foster father, stepfather, second husband, etc. Though the characters are driven (even to suicide) by these contrived linkages, there is no emotional impact provided for the viewer.

In the unplayable lead role, Masayo Utsunomiya has a beautiful face which is about all one can carry away from the picture's trite visual imagery. Her acting is hard to assess, as Takahayashi inconsistently has her strike poses to fit contradictory scenes. As the tattooist, Tomisaburo Wakayama (familiar stocky hero from he Baby Cart series seen here as "Shogun Assassin", presents a dull workman, far removed from the mythical, mystical character in the script. Despite the lurid material, "Irezumi"'s sexual and nude content is minimal.

You have to see this movie twice at minimum. In the first fifteen minutes or more you see a man who is completely obsessed by a woman's skin, and he is willing to leave his wife for being with her. But she must have a certain master's tattoo on her back.

When you see this, you will ask yourself what kind of obsession is shown here. But the movie brings you completely in, it catches you with the silent tension, virtuously carried by the great actors, the slow directing and the music. After a while, you are a voyeur of a powerful erotic action, where the sexual act is used to support the act of creativity, and pain is transformed to lust. But the masters way to create his art by abusing the future wearer, destroys his family. He knows that. But he must do it in his way.

There is a bit of a constructed drama here, like in "Manji" (1964), but it makes sense and has much more power. Comparing it to "Pillow book" would be an insult. I love Greenaway's "ZOO", but he couldn't come even near to "Irezumi". For him, Japanese culture is only a vehicle to transport his artificial phrase.

Irezumi is one of my most beloved masterworks. I don't know a movie which has a more erotic - and I mean erotic in the word's best sense - impression, although there is no real sex scene. I gave a 10.

This is a subtle and beautiful film.The fact that almost no Japanese women have tattoos is the beginning point of the film in which a woman's tattoo is symbolic of the way in which she is prepared to degrade herself for the lover who insists she gets tattooed. Yet the exact process of the tattooing, of which he is unaware, with its strange sadomasochist eroticism, gives her the power to throw her degradation back in his face.

The hypnotic sounds of this part of the film as the needle punctures flesh, the slow trickles of blood, the warm darkness amid the snowy landscapes, the cloying atmosphere of conspiratorial guilt, erotic degradation and also pride and beauty and defiance and expiation of past mistakes - this film is very subtle, very loaded and in some ways almost feminist in its exploration of what men do to women, all written out on the flesh.

And the many unknown connections between all the characters, symbolised by the book of snow crystals, the way in which each of them shapes the lives of the others without knowing the connections that shape their own, lives as evanescent and blown on the wind as the snow crystals.

I think this is a great film which should be recognised as such. Unfortunately many people who see the film are threatened by its eroticism, particularly its aestheticisation and sexualisation of pain. But that is in many ways the symbolic point of the film, the pain of life and love written on the body.

This is what i called misleading of culture. I believe the movie does not represent the "missing generation of Japan" nor the entire of Japanese people. It is extremely uncommon that Japanese women have t"Irezumi" on their body. Therefore the movie is a bit of the film-maker imagination. It is not worth seeing the movie unless you would like to see Japanese women' naked bodies. Flat. However the cinematography is pretty nice along with its lighting efforts. It might be interesting for those who can speak Japanese as they can follow the conversation right away. Girls are not pretty enough. I suppose they are the Japanese porn stars. To create balance in the movie, the male actor should be naked too. It creates more natural reality. Don't you think so??

In modern day Tokyo, all types of folks walk around with visible tattoos. From biker to rocker to punk it's very common now.

But back in 1982, tattoos meant one thing, Yakuza. That's the taboo.

A male getting inked meant loyalty, a woman meant ownership. Women ve-e-e-e-e-e-e-ry rarely got them. This talks about one that wanted to.

The subject was a show-stopper at the time. Controversy reigned. But it shows a gutsy move by the lead character and how she deals with life. The romantic interludes might be lost on those with not much knowledge of Japan. If you've been there, you'll get it though.

It moves a bit slow at times, and the print I saw was a bit dark, but it shows a part of Japanese society that's still has a bit of dodginess in it. The woman should be seen as a groundbreaker. Will you see her as one? Go find out.