Branded to Kill

The avant-garde lives next door to the B-movie ghettos, and Seijun Suzuki razes the fences with Branded to Kill. Theoretically, there’s a plot—assassins, butterflies, betrayal, something something, death—but its presence is more out of habit than choice. If nothing else, it provides a structure for Suzuki to dynamite, and images sprout like flowers from the ruins: a dead woman’s hair swirling in the toilet, a live woman’s face shellacked with rain, an apartment wall pinned full of dead butterflies. Whatever emotional coherence lacking in the story’s discombobulated gangster clichés is found in these startling visions of annihilation. Not that the film is entirely abstract: Suzuki makes a concentrated effort to articulate this loopy system of ranked hire killers jockeying for position while engaging in slapstick assassinations or other inexplicable adventures. Yet the director’s inner anarchist will not be calmed, and if the film sometimes resembles a towering monument built upon a swamp, that’s probably the point. Suzuki is a cinematic saboteur par excellence, but his primary target is most often himself. Every character with more than one line may be a murderer, but this is still a film where the hero has a fetish for sniffing boiling rice, which does tend to somewhat deflate the tough-guy mystique that comes with being the third-ranked killer in the country, world, or whatever.

Over 30 years later, Suzuki would return to this same set-up for Pistol Opera, a vastly different yet equally powerful take on the material. Sporting the director’s trademark monochromatic colours, the later film emphasizes the unreality of the story, stylizing the settings into something theatrical, treating the characters as little more than lifelike dolls to be posed in elaborate playhouses. Freed from the shackles of his Nikkatsu studio contract, Suzuki would completely unleash his formalist tendencies in Pistol Opera as he stared down death with a steeliness that would make even the unflappable Joe Shishido tremble. Politely put, Branded to Kill is just slightly more unhinged (actually, it’s utterly bugfuck). Like its successor, the film is obsessed with mortality, but it offers the frenzy of youth in the place of the serenity of age. At once terrified and mischievous, Branded to Kill doesn’t gaze into the abyss so much as just throw a few firecrackers into the void and then run like hell. Perhaps there is some comfort to be gleaned from Suzuki’s conception of living with death as a hyper-violent buddy comedy. Perhaps it’s just more fun to laugh as you tumble into your grave. Or perhaps the real truth is found in how Hanada, No. 3 killer and No. 1 chump, faces a paralyzing despair like something out of Beckett: “I must kill, I can’t kill, I’ll kill.” What does it matter? The final outcome is the same.

Tokyo Drifter

Tokyo Drifter is an all-out open assault on pulp cinema, less an exemplar of low-budget B-movie craft than a savage rebuke of tough-guy gangster films and pop culture in general. Seijun Suzuki, the avant-trash auteur, elevates the material through his sheer contempt for it. The pop-art gloss of the film is beauty with an edge, the seductive shine of a glittering blade or polished bullet. Every frame exhudes tension, from the disjointed editing and flattened compositions to the hysterical shrieking of the colours. Money and power rule everything while honour is dead, and presumably Suzuki is talking about modern capitalism and not just his day job (he was just two years away from being bounced from Nikkatsu Studios for making one too many incoherent pop-art provocations like this). In this world of violence and neon, titular drifter Tetsu risks self-destruction through an old-fashioned sense of loyalty. Duly chastised, he swings so far the other way that he severs all human connection rather than risk being hurt again, or as he sneeringly tells his lover, he can’t walk with a woman at his side. Commerce corrupts all human bonds, and pop culture provides a front for the sick system. A secretary giggles at comic books while mobsters wheel and deal around her. Teenagers dance continually in a frenzied bebop delirium as bullets whizz by. People are never happier than when discussing their hair dryers.

Pistol Opera

In the world of Pistol Opera, there seem to be only two types of people: assassins, and their victims. And among the assassins, the greatest and most feared is Hundred Eyes, who sees everything. The calling card of this killer is a single shot through the back of the skull, piercing the brain in just the right spot to produce a smile on the corpse’s face. A fitting poetic touch for Seijun Suzuki’s immaculately shot and incoherently told film, which turns all violence into a kind of performance art. With death reduced to harmless prettiness, who wouldn't greet it with a grin?

The plot could have been stolen from some forgotten B-movie (in a sense it was, being loosely derived from Suzuki’s own 1967 Branded to Kill); the style would make the avant-garde blush. Good luck making sense out of any of this. We’ve got a female assassin named Stray Cat, ranked No. 3 by an unseen guild. She finds herself the target of No. 1 (Hundred Eyes), who is mowing through the rest of the top-ten assassins, wiping out the competition. For the sake of her own survival, Stray Cat must somehow lure Hundred Eyes out of hiding and defeat the great killer.

People die. Sometimes they reappear. Narrative cul-de-sacs are everywhere. The film periodically stops—not that it ever really builds up much momentum to begin with—for characters to tell us about their dreams. The final shoot-out occurs on a sound stage made up in pseudo-Grecian style, filled with savage slave-mutes wielding battle-axes. Do not ask why. Why does someone drop their pants and start pissing in the street? Why does someone wander the grocery store muttering, over and over, “I’m Blanche Dubois”? Sometimes there is no reason. They’re just fucking crazy.

Yet we should be careful to distinguish—this may be madness, but there is nothing manic about it. This assassination tango is violence devoid of viscera. Viewers expecting the usual kinetic kick of cinematic violence will likely be baffled by Suzuki’s languid style. When someone is shot in the back, they do not jolt or spasm. They merely pause, as if to contemplate the bullet breaking the skin, and then gracefully collapse. When a woman is shot while diving into a pool, the water turns deep red—except directly around her, where it remains a serene, untouched shade of blue. One of the assassins, No. 5 according to the latest quarterly report, is aptly named Painless Surgeon and never loses a drop of blood, even when repeatedly stabbed. For a film filled with so much death, there’s a surprising absence of red outside of the production design (where it abounds in poppy fields and flags).

You can appreciate the aesthetics of Suzuki’s violence, the purity of each gesture and pose. It’s a rare scene that isn’t at least worth a holy-shit-lookit-that double take. But the futility of this violence is also evident in every mannered moment. The position of No. 1 is a dubious prize—all it means is that everyone else is going to be taking shots at you (no wonder No. 1 decides to take out everyone else first). Between the images of mushroom clouds and talk of bloody flags, you can sense an underlying repulsion towards the pageantry of violence, although perhaps not a lucid argument. I’m not saying the film makes sense, but there’s at least a coherent nihilism in its final howling outburst of “Idiot!”

By that point, frustrated viewers may echo the sentiment, but the film is curiously affecting in its maddening way. I’m drawn to the old woman’s strange baroque-poetic description of her dream about a giant goldfish dying on a beach, its scales catching the light of the setting sun and turning decay into a beautiful sight. And then night falls, and the beauty disappears in the dark, and yet, the old woman says, still there is something comforting about living so close to death. Befitting a film made by a 78-year-old, Pistol Opera possesses a benign fascination with death, exploring its beauty and discovering comfort in the banality of its repetition. Suzuki does not tremble before it, possessing a calm mind and steady hand—a painless surgeon draining the blood from the greatest terror.