Yumeji (1991)

Cult Japanese filmmaker, Seijun Suzuki collaborated with producer Genjiro Arato once again, to come up with a third film almost 10 years after 1981's "Kagero-Za". This three-film set is what later came to be known as the Taisho Roman Trilogy of films, all being surrealist psychological dramas with elements of the supernatural, set in the Taisho period.

"Yumeji" (1991) takes the philosophy of the first two films to a new level by building its unreal story around a character from real life. This is a semi-fictional (more fiction, than fact, quite obviously!) account of real life Japanese artist/painter and poet, Takesiha Yumeji. Thus "Yumeji" becomes a unique hybrid; a surrealist psychological thriller cum biopic!

Regardless of whether there are similarities with the actual life of the artist Yumeji or not, screenwriter Yozo Tanaka has spun a rather interesting yarn revolving around the eponymous central character. After a soulful title track in the credits that sets a melancholic as well as a sad-ghost-story mood, "Yumeji" begins on a shockingly off-kilter note with a sequence of images and scenes that are disorienting enough to make you feel ill at ease. It is almost like an overdone nightmare sequence, with Yumeji (portrayed by Japanese glam rock artist Kenji Sawada) who at first seems to be chasing a woman in red, perched upon a tree, and then ends up in a chair with a long pistol, while a faceless man with a top hat rambles some words about seeing the woman’s face, and asks Yumeji to shoot him!

The first ten odd minutes are filled with such visual as well as verbal randomness. Conversations between characters don't make much sense and scenes and backdrops change at the drop of a hat. There are talks of Yumeji eloping with his lady love, his artworks appear on a pillar of a train station as he touches it (!),  and eventually, instead of eloping, he ends up having sex with another woman in a ramshackle dwelling. The woman herself is an animated, clown-like woman while Yumeji is an eccentric, flamboyant, moody playboy who breaks into a song or a poem and sometimes, suddenly gets hysterical or acts like a buffoon! After the jarring beginning, the plot starts to take shape in an isolated location in Kanagawa, where Yumeji encounters different women, and comes face to face with a murderer being hunted by the police and various ghosts and apparitions, including the spirit of the person whose widow he seduces!

In the tradition of the first two films of the trilogy, in "Yumeji", the lines between dream and reality are blurred. What is real and what is imagined (either within or outside of a dream), is left to the viewer to interpret. Suzuki unleashes his trademark idiosyncrasies of filming style and editing, and invites you to have a ball with the madness on the screen…if you are ready for it! With beautiful cinematography by Junichi Fujisawa (although it doesn't match up to the radiating brilliance of the first two films, which were cinematographed by Kazue Nagatsuka), we are subjected to a colorful canvas of a dream universe on celluloid with a bizarre story at its center that lends some food for thought despite its incoherent nature. 

As the story proceeds, it is not just the backdrops and scenes that shift, it is also the mood and tempo of the narrative! While at times, "Yumeji" appears to be an enigmatic horror story with some creepy images and a haunting background score to go along, halfway through, it changes tone and turns into a slapstick comedy with a mad bunch of characters resorting to absurd lunacy. The bunch also includes the murderer on a horse, carrying a scythe in a great slow motion sequence with nary a sound apart from the galloping of the horse, that does not sync with the slow speed of the scene! This scene is a testament of how Suzuki wants to just let his imagination run wild with his scene composition and not adhere to convention in the least!

After an intriguing first third, it is the sequences in the second third of the film that seem to ramble on aimlessly and border on the tedium. But before one could write off the film as yet another exercise in a boisterous display of self-indulgence and pretense, Suzuki brings things back on track in the last third with an interesting twist and a new direction to interpret the story thus far! It is at this juncture that several questions could make way into an enthusiastic viewer's mind. A sudden change of events and the inclusion of some key scenes make us question Yumeji's psyche and his art inspirations. Did his art manifest in his dreams/hallucinations, or did they in fact give him inspiration to produce new art? As he struggles with his own personality and its variations, and also the insecurities stemming from the presence of his peers/competitors, Yumeji makes a rapid descent into insanity…or does he?

To expect any concrete answer out of "Yumeji" is absurd (no pun intended!). The idea is to give in to Suzuki's wild imagination and enjoy it in its hallucinatory glory. There is some sublime music to go along too. Watch out for the clever little scene with a glass replication of what seems to be falling rain drops, with a forlorn looking Tomoyo (Tomoyo Mariya) in a bridal gown, against Shigeru Umebayashi's haunting music piece "Yumeji's theme" that was later used as the central theme in Wong Kar-Wai's "In the Mood for Love" (2000).

"Yumeji" doesn't break new grounds stylistically, nor does it surpass the first film of the set "Zigeunerweisen" (1980), which still remains the best of the three, but it certainly provides for a solid film experience.

Score: 8/10

Kagero-Za (1981)

Cult Japanese director Seijun Suzuki follows up his excellent "Zigeunerweisen" (1980), a surreal odyssey in the realms of the unknown, with "Kagero-Za" (1981), which is yet another bizarre fantasy/fable, based on Yōzō Tanaka's screenplay of the Kyōka Izumi novel.

While Suzuki succeeded in creating a feverish dream atmosphere with the right audio-visual elements and an intriguing series of episodes in the life of the protagonist in the first film of his Taisho Roman Trilogy, he lets down with this somewhat tepid follow-up when it comes to recreating the same magical appeal. It is not, however, entirely Suzuki's fault, for he tries his best to tap the script which itself is a little deficient and uninteresting.

Like its predecessor "Kagero-Za" tells of the strange events in the life of the protagonist, this time a playwright by the name of Matsuzaki (Yusaku Matsuda). The events mostly involve a romantic/sexual encounter with Shinako (Michiyo Okuso) who dresses up in Japanese traditional wear, picks flowers from a cemetery and believes that souls of women can be trapped in bladder cherries! Then there is the omnipresent wealthy businessman and bird-hunter, Tamawaki (Katsuo Nakamura) who may have had two wives, one of them being a German who dyes her hair black and darkens her eyes to look like a Japanese woman, but the moonlight reveals her true self! Tamawaki seems to follow Matsuzaki everywhere he goes and is possibly manipulating the events in his life. Things take a weirder angle, as ghostly presences of the dead seem to appear, and love letters written in someone's dreams are sent to our protagonist in real life! Add to that, some absurd situations like a full-fledged party thrown by Tamawaki, replete with hired girls dancing to upbeat music, to celebrate the passing of his wife!

A lot is, of course, left to interpretation (if one should be so interested), for not everything in Suzuki's fantastical universe makes much sense, placed in the logical perspective. Throw real life logic out the window and think only from a half-asleep dream perspective and then one wouldn't be taken aback by the events in the film. Much of what is shown is supposed to be taken at face value as a given. With that goal in mind, Suzuki subjects the viewer to a good number of dreamscapes, full of bizarre oddities that are awe-inspiring. 

Spatial inconsistencies, idiosyncratic editing techniques, randomness of dialog, little of which makes any real sense, sudden switching to slow motion and back, are all in abundance. We see a character jump cut from one backdrop to another, when the scene is supposed to happen in a single location. Camera zooms in and out in a fraction of a second. A cartoonish device is employed as well, in which a character appears in a scene in a flash, as if teleported from elsewhere, when his input is required in the scene! Recurring, outlandish images are aplenty but none as scary and nightmarish as those seen in the preceding film.

Rather than being a trippy nightmare, with a goose-bumpy score, unlike its predecessor, "Kagero-Za" takes a more comical angle, although it deals with a lot of serious stuff too. Like a lovers' suicide pact, for example, which also has an uncalled for, emotional angle to it. There is a lot of emphasis on traditional Japanese culture here, including a score mostly comprised of Japanese traditional folk music (with some exceptional moments of Jazz!) and at least two elaborate performances including one especially disturbing, but loud and excruciatingly long Noh theatre-ish act by kids enacting a play with evidently adult themes!

This sequence overstays its welcome along with other things like the introduction of the disgustingly lewd and bawdy vagabond Wada (played by Yoshio Harada, who in fact was one of the best things about "Zigeunerweisen"), and his subplot revolving around hollow dolls which reveal the inner self of the individual they represent. However, embedded within the cavities are some miniature raunchy clay sculptures! This angle of Wada and the dolls with holes lacks any real appeal, even from the surrealist perspective, but somehow finds a way in the main narrative! It is about here that the proceedings nose-dive into a rabbit hole and the narrative balances itself on edge, dangerously close to the line of mediocrity. This final act also includes the aforementioned kids' theatre play that tries to reiterate the actual plot of the film, only to confuse the viewer further!

With recurring motifs, a few extraordinary images that would make sense only in the subconscious dream world, and some gorgeous cinematography by Kazue Nagatsuka, Suzuki tries to salvage the material at hand, but somehow falls short of evoking the same kind of a nervous joy and excitement that resulted after a viewing session of his "Zigeunerweisen". Perhaps the acting leaves a little to be desired as well, and the fact that there is a single narrative thread that attempts to come full circle with a definite conclusion in "Kagero-Za", rather than a series of snippets of memories, dreams and happenings in the life of one individual. The narrative trudges along, and lacks the right amount of dynamics and ingenuity to sustain the length of the film and make it fuller, except when Suzuki intersperses it with occasional off-the-wall imagery that help to bring the viewer right back in tune.

"Kagero-Za" (1981) is a decent offering from Suzuki; patchy, but pleasing to a substantial degree. Sadly, it just doesn't match up to the standard set by its predecessor.

Score: 7/10

 

Zigeunerweisen (1980)

 

A long hiatus later, the tragically blacklisted bad boy of Japanese Cinema, Seijun Suzuki returned to filmmaking in the late 70s. In collaboration with producer Genjiro Arato, Suzuki made the first film of what would later be known as the Taisho Roman trilogy which mostly told stories that were a fascinatingly odd mix of surrealist psychological dramas and tales of the supernatural!

This particular story revolves around strange occurrences in the life of Toyojiro Aochi (Toshiya Fujita), a professor of German in the Taisho period in the late 30s. There is no definite plot structure or theme to relate in "Zigeunerweisen" (1980), the title of which refers to a musical composition in a Pablo de Sarasate gramophone record which is the key recurring motif in this bizarre odyssey of Aochi. The record plays in the beginning and two voices ponder about some incoherent spoken words in the record that shouldn't be there, for it's an instrumental record.

Later we come to know that one of the voices is of Aochi himself while the other of Nakasago, an odd character with a fetish for bones and skeletons, especially the red ones! Nakasago may also be Aochi's old friend and colleague. Nakasago (Yoshio Harada) who looks like Jesus Christ, and dresses up like a monk, is accused of murder of a local village woman married to another man. Aochi comes to his rescue and the villagers let him go. This is the simple beginning to what's to turn into one of the most extraordinarily absurd stories ever told with a straight face ever since Luis Bunuel's last few films!

Nakasago claims that he did not kill the woman. It was six red crabs who ate into her flesh. They all later came out of her private parts! As bizarre as it sounds, Aochi who mostly bears one expression on his face, seems to accept Nakasago's claims and the two move on to the next part of their journey involving a geisha O-Ine (Naoko Ôtani) and three singing beggars, two of whom are blind. Going any further ahead with the plot or its synopsis won't serve any purpose, for Suzuki's film is not much about story or logic, as it is about an irrational universe created by Suzuki based on a novel by Hyakken Uchida. 

Only Suzuki ensures that however ridiculous and over-the-top the events and happenings in his story may seem, they enthrall and captivate the target audience who will most definitely lap up the proceedings with their mouths wide open and their eyes transfixed to the screen! Suzuki's film brings to mind Luis Bunuel's final films of his French era, especially, "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" (1972), "The Phantom of Liberty" (1974), and "That Obscure Object of Desire" (1977). These are the kind of films which occur only in the Bunuel universe, wherein any odd or ludicrous occurrence is taken at face value, without questions being asked, almost as if they were regular, mundane events. Of course, in Suzuki's film, Aochi keeps reiterating that it is all rather strange, but brushes these episodes aside, nevertheless!

Suzuki's film, however, lacks that overtly comic touch of Bunuel films, and that's a good thing in the context of this film. Although some subtle comedy exists in small bits, the film oscillates between horror and surrealism. There is no real plot that comes to a full closure, but a series of episodes that happen in the life of Aochi, all involving his weird friend Nagasako! What is awe-inspiring is the way these events are narrated. Sometimes characters start telling their stories, and the film cuts to flashback. Sometimes Aochi tells his own tales in voice-overs; stories that extend over almost 10 years! Whether these yarns are real events, dream sequences or hallucinations is not clear. The viewer can only infer from the total outlandishness of the some of the tales whether they took place only in the character's mind or whether some credibility can be lent to what happened.

To further create a disorienting and unsettling, nightmarish feel to the proceedings, Suzuki lends his own special touch. A fluid narrative style interspersed with moments of silence, and slow motion images giving off an oneiric feel are seen at times. The silence is broken with a hint of a chillingly quiet background score that oozes a strange feeling of a foreboding nature. Some of the images are downright scary, enough to give modern horror films a run for their money! Suzuki also employs seamless match-cut editing and some more innovative techniques in his splices between present and flashback. For instance, one woman lying on the bed starts narrating a story, the camera zooms in on a window, and zooms back out, and voila! We now enter flashback mode! In yet another example of oddball imaginative creativity, Suzuki, without caring for any logic, comfortably changes the backdrop of a scene. Two men conversing on the street suddenly appear to be standing in a dark cave to continue their conversation and back again! 

The visual department and atmospherics are the primary winning points, also accentuated and enhanced by the gorgeous cinematography by Kazue Nagatsuka. His use of colour, and black and white, both stand out in their amazingly contrasting glory. However, it is not just the imagery that stands out but also the sound design and brilliant music score by Kaname Kawachi that adds a deliciously creepy and hypnotizing effect. Of course, Sarasate's record and its music play a very important role too, especially in the most ingenious way the defect in the record comes full circle! 

Suzuki's power lies in his storytelling and how well he visualizes the freaky narrative proceedings. He makes "Zigeunerweisen" an unforgettable and captivating audio-visual experience that engages throughout by literally letting us immerse into his strange, desolate world. The only minor problem in the film lies in some bits which come across as a tad repetitive and without any major consequence. "Zigeunerweisen" is nevertheless, a riveting film experience, a spectacular supernatural thriller/ghost story/surrealist psychological drama or whatever you might want to call it.

Seijun Suzuki returned to filmmaking with a bang with this gem and yet it is sad to learn that most exhibitors declined to screen the film. Hence, producer Genjiro Arato himself screened the film in a mobile inflatable tent, to great success that led to an Honourable Mention at the 31st Berlin International Film Festival and winning of four Japanese Academy Awards! The rest, as they say, is history.

Score: 9/10