| In the underground gambling dens of Tokyo, a nihilistic yakuza hit man recently released from prison meets a disaffected debutante bored with her social position. On the surface, director Masahiro Shinoda’s Pale Flower (Japan, 1964) looks like yet another spin on the tale of the wild princess and the noble warrior, but in fact it’s less a typical yakuza movie than a meditation on the randomness of fate in post-nuclear Japan.
Elegant in its simplicity, Pale Flower opens with a mordant voiceover by Muraki (Ryo Ikebe), who, as a hired killer, maintains a decidedly amoral perspective on the value of human life. An archetypal antihero, he is reticent about the changes that have greeted him in the outside world after three years in jail – his girlfriend is set to marry another man while his gang boss has struck a truce with their former rivals. Although he will never say as much, it isn’t too difficult to figure out which betrayal affects this loyal gangster most deeply.
His only certainty being uncertainty, Muraki takes refuge in the city’s illegal casinos, where he becomes enraptured with Saeko (Mariko Kaga), a young, high-rolling femme fatale who’s constantly in search of a bigger thrill. Gambling is the central point of connection between these two alienated individuals, and Shinoda accentuates the ritualized nature of the hana-fuda card games they play in long, hypnotic sequences throughout the film. Here, it isn’t the amount being wagered that is important, but rather the idea that gambling is an assertion of one’s existence – I bet, therefore I am.
With this bleak, minimalist worldview, Shinoda and screenwriter Masaru Baba elevate Pale Flower to the level of a cynical noir classic. Masao Kosugi’s chiaroscuro cinematography creates a morally ambiguous universe out of silhouettes, the characters boxed in by strong compositional frames and espousing fatalistic philosophy through dialogue that’s boiled hard enough to crack. Toru Takemitsu’s score is fittingly irreverent, employing dizzying jazz motifs in the action sequences and more subdued experimental elements to complement the film’s long discussions about the meaninglessness of life and death, love and loss.
If it weren’t such an impeccable work of cinematic art, Pale Flower might seem heavy and ponderous. Certainly, the studio heads at Shochiku, who delayed the release of the picture for several months, fretted about the way it would be received. Their concern might have had as much to do with the film’s implicit critique of Occidentalism as it did with its unmitigated pessimism. Given that the yakuza bosses are seen dining under a print of the Mona Lisa, one wonders if Shinoda was directing his satire at the studio heads themselves. Whatever the case, the film remains particularly scornful of the influence of Western values in postwar Japanese culture.
The suspicion with which Shochiku regarded Shinoda’s undeniably unusual film calls to mind the similar treatment by the Nikkatsu studio of another offbeat yakuza benchmark, Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill (1967), a few years later. Shinoda’s film is much more serious than Suzuki’s deliriously irreverent comedy, but it is certainly no less unorthodox. Like yin and yang, the two films would make for a highly entertaining double feature. |
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