Shochiku execs hoped for a "Sun Tribe" ("Japanese youth culture) hit when the studio, famous for its films with Ozu, bankrolled a lurid yakuza story set in Tokyo's gambling dens. Pale Flower, a 1964 film, directed by Masahiro Shinoda, however, turned out to be so ineffably weird that the businessmen didn't know what to do with it. The picture was shelved for a few months while the executives tried to figure out how to market what was, in effect, an elliptical and bizarrely expressionistic work of experimental film-making. (The score by Toru Takemitsu channels Stockhausen by way of Duke Ellington and was, probably, the most astringently avant-garde music in existence at the time.) Once the movie was released, Pale Flower was an unexpected box-office success, one of the landmarks of the Japanese nouvelle vague. It's not the sort of picture that a viewer can understand in one viewing and I wonder what the audiences that flocked to see the movie made of it. The picture is challenging, a vessel for odd geo-political cross-currents depicted allegorically in the film -- it's interesting in an abstract way but too cold, calculating, and nihilistic to be emotionally compelling. The film fascinates, but I thought it was also somewhat tedious -- immersion in what can't be understood is gripping at first, but too much swimming in these glacially cold waters becomes tedious: you get sucked under.
A yakuza at the end of his tether is released from prison and returns to Tokyo. In a voice-over, he describes the megalopolis as a chaos filled with human swine. The gangster, Muraki, has spent three years behind bars for killing a member of an adversary gang. This crime turns out to have been spectacularly pointless. Muraki's gang has now formed an alliance with their former enemies in order to combat a third mob that is encroaching on their Tokyo territory. Therefore, Muraki's return, which everyone regards as surprising, is an embarrassment -- the boss for whom he killed the enemy gangster is now best friends with Muraki's former enemies. (We see the two men slurping Miso soup in a noodle joint and planning a fishing vacation together). Muraki meets an enigmatic woman, Saeko ("Psycho"?) gambling with a bunch of shirtless tattooed yakuza. The gangsters are playing some kind of game with completely inscrutable rules -- it involves tiny stiff cards with flowering trees printed on them. The cards make a weird clicking sound as they are shuffled and Takemitsu scores the gambling scenes with bizarre rattles and clicking sounds (he recorded two famous Japanese tap-dancers performing on concrete for the sequence); sometimes, brass blaring in dissonant chords sound while the croupier bellows out various enigmatic phrases over and over again like some kind of demented auctioneer. (According to the commentary on the film, ordinary Japanese would have no idea how the game is played -- it's called "matched draw" and is intrinsic to a certain form of yakuza culture.). This gambling is set up as a ritual invoking pure chance -- there doesn't seem to be any skill involved or even much sport. Cards are tirelessly shuffled and cut with a rickety-tick sound and, then, after much repetitive hectoring, a cloth covering a card is lifted and someone wins while the others lose. Muraki becomes obsessed with the mysterious woman. She is either some sort of embodiment of a Shinto goddess or an angel of death or both. Saeko has no back-story; she appears out of nowhere in a late model sports car and she seems to have limitless money. Saeko has unblinking big eyes dark as midnight and she glares at her cards like a reptile of some sort and she's an odd-looking, seductive, but deadly apparition. Saeko asks Muraki to find her a higher stakes game and he obliges. Meanwhile, the gang bosses scheme about the third crime family invading their turf. After a gambling bout with high-rollers -- the gambling den seems to be enclosed by a series of cages -- Saeko and Muraki go for a ride in her sports car. She gets into a nearly lethal racing competition with a bearded dude with his own fast car -- the vehicles tool all over Tokyo, passing on curves and swerving to avoid crashes. It's pretty clear that Saeko is a thrillseeker with a potentially lethal appetite for risk. The high-roller games are guarded by a Chinese mafia-type named Yoh. Yoh is a heroin addict and he squats at the side of the mats unrolled for gambling balefully eyeing the proceedings. Saeko seems interested in Yoh who is, if anything, even more of a dead-ender than Muraki. During a gambling binge, enemy gangsters raid the gaming den. Saeko and Muraki have to crawl into bed together and pretend to be having sex to avoid arrest by the corrupt cops shaking down the enterprise. Even though they are in bed together, it's pretty clear that neither Saeko nor Muraki are interested in sex and, maybe, even incapable of attempting it. Muraki feels that he is losing Saeko to Yoh -- he has a showy psychedelic nightmare to this effect. (This dream sequence is the film's biggest misstep-- it's solarized with obvious imagery.) Yoh tries to kill Muraki in a funhouse maze of deserted alleyways and gloomy empty taverns. Muraki escapes. In a last ditch effort to impress Saeko. Muraki agrees to kill the mobster who leads the third gang -- he tells Saeko that committing a murder is the ultimate thrill and invites her to observe the homicide. In an elaborate sequence scored to the final aria from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, Muraki kills the head of the invading mob -- this takes place in some sort of elaborate restaurant atop a mountain of steep stairways and decorated with stained glass windows of Jesus and the Virgin Mar (and bizarrely "Nelson at Trafalgar"). Muraki goes back to prison for the killing which Saeko has watched with the fascination of dark-eyed cobra hypnotizing her prey. In jail, Muraki learns that Saeko has been killed in a "crime of passion" by Yoh. Two years have passed. Muraki's informant says: "We finally learned who she was --" But before he can explain, Muraki's exercise time in the yard is over and he has to return to his cell in a prison that is shot as a pitch-black series of corridors. In voice-over, Muraki tells us he still "hungers" for Saeko.
In summary the film seems more clear than it is while watching. There are some haphazard subplots.; Muraki has a girlfriend who lives, for some obscure symbolic reason,. in a clock shop. The ticking clocks rattling on the soundtrack are a particularly invasive and percussive element of Takemitsu's score. After having sex with woman (who comes equipped with complicated if hard to understand back story of abuse -- the opposite of Saeko who has no backstory at all), Muraki abandons her -- he has no time for any kind of conventional relationship.. In fact, later, another girlfriend pursues him, but Muraki urges her to marry a bourgeoise salary man -- characteristically, this part of the story is shown in a way that makes it very difficult to integrate with the rest of the movie. Shinoda has a habit of introducing new characters without warning -- here we see the salaryman importuning Muraki's girl in a way that is smarmy and, possibly, bullying. The woman doesn't respond to the bespectacled salaryman and, then, we see her with Shinoda who summarily tells her to marry the suitor that she has just rejected. All of this comes at us from nowhere. An apprentice yakuza tries to stab Muraki (since Muraki killed his crime-boss buddy resulting in his three-year bid), fails, and then has to cut off his pinky finger and deliver it to the hero is a matchbox. Later, the kid becomes fast friends with Muraki. When Muraki buys him a suit, he's careful to put the severed finger in its little box in the garment's breast-pocket. It's this kid who delivers the news to Muraki that Saeko has died in a "crime of passion" with Yoh. Yoh has no lines in the film -- he just squats in a corner glaring at everyone. The film is full of elaborately explored mini-labyrinths -- the gambling dens have barred cages around their entries and are shown as long narrow rooms surrounded by other dark narrow rooms where various sentries and body guards lurk. Yoh's attack on Muraki takes place in Yokohama's red light district, ,in real life closed by order of the State -- it's another labyrinth of tiny shops and taverns all of them shut down, a circus of sinister shadows. The jail where Muraki is immured at the end of the film features a forty foot tall wall of polished ashlar and enormous doors that incongrously rise fifteen or so feet above the pavement -- the prison is a German expressionist vision of what an Asian fortress-jail might look like. Most of the film takes place in darkness, empty streets, bars with flashing neon, dark mazes everywhere. Shinoda has said that the film represent Japan allegorically as Muraki, a figure who is radically unfree suspended between the thuggish Chinese Communists (represented by Yoh) and the savagely Capitalist (Americanized) Tokyo infested by vicious gangsters. This explanation is interesting but unconvincing. To my eyes, the film demonstrates a particular form of "No Exit" -- gambling signifies a world organized according to wholly absurd and destructive rules, a paradigm for the absurd. Saeko proclaims that she is desperately bored and her life is organized around increasingly desperate forms of thrill-seeking. The camerawork is ultra-noir revealing a world of blind alleys and encroaching dark shadows. The tattooed gambling gangsters leer at the lens. It's all claustrophobic, a world in which the brightest scenes take place in the exercise yard of a vast symbolic prison.
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