1965: Story of a Prostitute

Story of a Prostitute (1965, Suzuki) 8/10

On its surface Seijun Suzuki's 1965 film Story of a Prostitute appears to be little more than a quasi-Romeo and Juliet story of two torn lovers doomed to spend their lifetimes unable to openly love one another. Yet, there is something deeper here within Suzuki's film. This less a film about romance and more about death.

The setting is World War II China. The Japanese army are slowly beginning to lose their grip on the war. Harumi (Yumiko Nagawa) is a young women who has volunteered to work as a "comfort woman": utilizing her body as a service for the troops. Her reasons for participating in such a project is to spite a former upper-class lover, who she believes will be eternally shamed for failing to marry her. This initial action sets-up a key characteristic of Harumi: she takes revenge out on others by using herself as the instrument. Quickly she and her fellow prostitutes become accustomed to the dehumanizing nature of their labour. The men are savage and cruel, none moreso than Narita (Isao Tamagawa) the commanding officer of the local batallion who personally selects her to fulfill his debased sexual desires.

Their first intimate encounter is sadistic and distasteful, as the tyrannical Narita wields his authority by raping Harumi. His rank and sex dictate their encounters as he berates and abuses her for her choice of profession. He attempts to stress his potence by ritualistically fondling his sword, yet within him lies a feeble and corrupt creature. When Narita verbally abuses her, she demands him to curb his language as all officers are to speak in the manner of the Emperor. His reaction is swift and cruel: as he savagely physically abuses her before continuing his pattern of verbal, sexual and emotional assault.

Desperate to punish Narita for his response to her, Harumi begins to court his straightlaced and literate orderly Private Mikami (Tamio Kawachi). He resists her lure. Honour and upholding the conventions of the Japanese military hierarchy persuades him to resist her advances. He is the perfect military man: obedient, dehumanized and robotic. It is no surprise that Kawachi plays him with so little emotion and movement as the man he is playing is a living corpse.

About twenty-five minutes into the film, there is a beautiful shot in which Yumiko Nagawa stares in-between the bedposts realizing her trapped position. She is a prisoner to her bed and will never be able to socially mobilize herself away from that position. Mikami and Harumi briefly become secret lovers, but soon Mikami tries to revert back to their original status as unattached human beings.This static notion of status is another common theme in the film. Characters often try to change their fate, but more often than not, they become relegated to their position and demote themselves back to their rank. This is true in the characters relation to death.

Death is all-around Story of a Prostitute. It is on the battlefields and in the bedrooms. No-one can escape it. Mikami is already dead emotionally and spiritually. Harumi is rapidly dying and hopes to use her potential lover to save her: to allow her to live once more. The problem is Mikami is afraid to live. It is revealed that he was once an officer, but was soon relegated to the status of a private for disobedience. Now he is grown so disenchanted with the army and life in general that he barely steps out of line.He tries to breathe new possibilities into his fleeting life by reading philosophy by Diderot, but is soon absurdly declared a communist by his commanding officers. The army will not tolerate such liberal thought that strays from their rigid ideals. Thus rigor mortis begins to set-in on Mikami's life.

The battle between life and death is never more perverse than when Mikami is wounded in a trench. Dying in the mud, his fellow soldiers gather his machine gun and leave him to perish. Only Harumi is willing to save Mikami from certain death. Their capture by a Chinese faction promises life and the hope for a fruitful relationship to blossom. Yet, Mikami resists. The Japanese military code insists it is better to die rather than capture. Any escape back to the Japanese front will result in certain death via a court-martial. Thus Mikami is in a Catch-22 situation: to disobey the tattered codes of his imperialist matters or to return to the fold and certain death. Tired of the arbitrary authoritarianism within their ranks,Uno (Kentaro Kaji), a former fellow soldier in his battalion has already fled to the Chinese borders. He can promise Mikami freedom, but again he resists. Thus, Suzuki brings up a shot similar to that in his own Gate of Flesh made a year earlier. In that film, there is a brief glance at an American flag, which is encouraged to be spat upon; in this film there is the opposite, as a Chinese flag is shown as a diametric opposing force to Japanese imperialism, which should be spat upon.



Story of a Prostitute is the middle-piece in Suzuki's development from the Technicolor jazz-pop of Gate of Flesh to the harsh anti-Fascism of Fighting Elegy. As in Gate of Flesh, Story of a Prostitute demonstrates the power available to women in their sex. In Gate of Flesh, the prostitutes use sex to purify and maintain order within their society; in Story of a Prostitute sex (not rape) becomes a liberating force from tyranny and oppression. Harumi achieves liberation from the cruelties of Narita through sex and she hopes Mikami will too. Yet, he lacks the courage to fulfill his physical desires as he is repeatedly told the army's mantra to avoid wine and women, something his own officers fail to do. Unlike the surrealist flourishes of Gate of Flesh and Youth of the Beast, Suzuki demonstrates an emotional realism in Story of Prostitute that is gritty and painful. The scene in which Mikami and Harumi first consumate their relationship is beautiful as it is tragic as Mikami shivers and shakes upon his first sexual encounter; and later cries at the thought of what has just happened.

The harsh black and white widescreen cinematography, powerful acting (particularly by Yumiko Nagawa), tense script and rounded characterizations give this film a gritty authenticity and focus often lacking in Suzuki's films. Here the story is more important than the image. This most likely has to do with the fact Suzuki was an ardent fan of the novel the film is based upon, unlike his genre-bending gangster flicks that were culled from studio scripts that he had little or no interest in. That's not to say that Suzuki's sense of style is absent from this picture: on the contrary it is perhaps one of his most beautiful pictures in terms of visuals as he maximizes the full width of widescreen cinematography with Bergman-esque compositions, Wajda-style fluid tracking shots, swinging camera movements and stylized freeze-frames and slow-motion shots.

Even the film's moments of eroticism are done in a tasteful and artful manner that stresses the wholeness of sex within a loving relationship, rather than the rapid-fire exploitation shown in contemporary Hollywood films. Suzuki's cinematic interests here seem to once more be widespread: the opening shot is highly reminiscent of Kurosawa's Yojimbo as Harumi's lone warrior figure roams the desolate landscape; while Suzuki's heroine Harumi would not be out of place in a film by Sirk or Bergman.

At the film's stunning conclusion, Harumi's fellow prostitutes remark it is more cowardly to die and more difficult to live. This is the central mantra of Suzuki's film. War itself accomplishes nothing and its particpants achieve nothing but stagnating life itself. The scene in which Mikami recites the difference between a cowardly soldier and a courageous one perfectly sums up Suzuki's anti-war notions. Bravery and courage are not demonstrated by blindly following orders and participating in crazy feats; they are shown by acting against a corrupt authority and through living what little life we are given to the fullest.

Story of a Prostitute is available through Criterion

Other Seijun Suzuki Films Reviewed:
Youth of the Beast (1963) 7/10

Copyright 2006 8 ½ Cinematheque.

1963: Youth of the Beast

Youth of the Beast (1963, Suzuki) 7/10

A gay Yakuza driving under pink cherry blossom trees? A desert sandstorm on the outskirts of Tokyo? A hallucinatory figure gliding in mid-air? The Takeshita School of Knitting?

None of this is explicitly explained, nor does it firmly fuse together in Seijun Suzuki's 1964 pop-art-jazz gangster flick Youth of the Beast: a film dedicated more to the unconventionalities of the image, rather than the absurdities within a loosely conventional plot. What does it all signify in the grand scheme of things? Little. And how and why does it all come together? Only Suzuki knows. Youth of the Beast is a synthesis of multiple conflicting genres and styles mixed together in a concotion that is focused more on external aesthetics than on the internal dynamics of the script. Within the film's 91 minute running time there are conjoined elements as frayed and disconnected as the American Western, Yojimbo, Film Noir, Warner gangster flicks, Ozu, Fuller, Melville, Welles and Godard all thrown into a film that manages to elucidate little other than Suzuki's expansive cinematic tastes.

The film tells the story of Jo Mizuno (Jo Shishido) a disgraced ex-cop seeking revenge on the individual who murdered his former colleague in a supposed double suicide. Subsequently, Mizuno joins two rival Yakuza gangs and plays them off one another, whilst striving to find out who killed his deceased friend. The actual plot itself is of little importance, as Suzuki never really adheres to it: drifting in and out its fixed consciousness in order to explore the power of the image. This lack of streamlined purpose tends to result in a fluctuating storyline that plays like a film fast-forwarded through all the slow parts, with both positive and negative results. The positive is that the film runs at a breakneck pace that never lets up; the downside is that the plot is disconnected from the imagery. It is a film, which only seems to make sense in terms of a story, if one "goes with the flow," rather than the plot.

Like Antonioni's L'Avventura, the configuration of the composition tells the story, rather than the script. The two rival Yakuza's dress in the manner of professional accountants and businessmen, yet in actuality they act like negligent amateurs whose business model is built on an increasing scale of violent destruction. Each are a persona of fantasy: a decadent image of a cinematic version of a Yakuza. Their respectable businesses also demonstrate this pattern: owns a nightclub; the other is in the film business. They sit around in their plain offices without any real sign of purpose or direction. It is only when Mizuno enters the frame that their private undercurrents become public. They act simply on short-term emotion and their obsessions, rather than a calculated long-term plan: the most evident of which is the gay Yakuza Hideo who slashes the face of anybody who reminds him that he is "a son of a whore."

The obsessions become even more opposed as Yakuzas within the Nomoto clan particpate in such metaphorically intriguing comfort activities ranging from stroking cats to stroking guns.There is an internal lust for sadism, which is primarily taken out on women such as the heroin addict who crawls along the floor for another score, or the mistress who gets whipped by a jealous Yakuza who then fondles her amidst a sandstorm. Yet, the women in the film are just as conniving, utilizing blackmail and their own methods of revenge to balance out the equilibrium of the Yakuza underworld.

The film strings this concept of revenge, obsession and the gangster lifestyle are seen through its lively imagery:

- Mizuno wiping his blood-stained shoes on the clean shirt of an attacker
- A cat-obssessed Yakuza cleaning his blade on his favourite cat
- The pink-feather clad dancer who appears in the blackness of the night club
- The rival gangs fighting in their plush automobiles in a scene reminiscent of a Western gunfight
- The heroin addict ripping the lining out a chair for the next score
- The ritualistic eradication of limbs and body parts to satisfy old scores or to fulfill old habits

The film's architecture demonstrates both the decadence of this lifestyle, but also its debasement. For each scene in a palatial house or exotic club, there are also the blown-out houses similar to Suzuki's later Gate of Flesh and the windswept topography of L'Avventura. Like in the former the film's eroticism is charged with an element of sadistic glory and a desire to keep all the elemental figures within their natural social rank.

On more than one occasion Youth of the Beast is an irrational mess as a result of its abridged plot that seems destined to have been for an empty melodramatic crime film that has been razed down by Suzuki for maximum action. Instead, Suzuki uses the silent film approach of letting the images do the talking, which results in the loud vivid set-pieces and elaborate Technicolor images on display. The end-product is a film that is a highly entertaining feast of cinematic delights that is as memorable for its images as it is forgettable for its storyline. The pace is quick, the action loud and the acting taut.

Like Fuller's Naked Kiss it is a discombobulated fusion of several ideas, although this film comes out slightly better than the latter. There is a slight touch of organization here that keeps the picture together and prevents it from becoming an absolute wreck .There are better films than this by Suzuki, but there is perhaps none so memorable for accomplishing so much externally with so little internally.

* Youth Of The Beast is available through Criterion

Other Seijun Suzuki Films Reviewed:
Story of a Prostitute (1965) 8/10

Copyright 2006 8 ½ Cinematheque.