Tattooed Life (Irezumi ichidai, 1965)

Spurred by the tattooed yakuza figure in Big Bang Love, Juvenile A (who seems to be a fantasy or idealized projection of masculinity in the mind of the effeminate Jun), I dug this Seijun Suzuki movie out from the bottom of the Pile. Suzuki is probably best known now as the director of stylized genre provocations such as Tokyo Drifter (1966) and Branded to Kill (1967), but he started out making relatively mainstream genre films for Nikkatsu. Tattooed Life is right on the cusp of his move into the fully stylized approach that would lead to his exit from the studio system.

This is the story of two brothers, one a tough yakuza hitman and the other a sensitive young artist. When the younger brother kills a yakuza boss almost by accident, the two flee to a port city to catch a boat to Manchuria. There they get fleeced by a local operator and are forced to find work with a clan that does construction jobs. They meet two sisters, one who is married to the clan boss and one who is being pestered by a sleazy clan accountant. The artist falls in love with the married sister, while the younger sister falls in love with the yakuza.

The core of the movie is the complicated melodrama around these love relationships, which builds tension to the explosive finale. It's only in the finale that Suzuki lets loose with a barrage of stylistic, theatrical effects. Up to that point, the film is very naturalistic, and it provides a fascinating glimpse of seedy small towns and rural working class life. The characters are nicely drawn, each with a well-defined goal. The yakuza brother wants to protect his weaker brother so that he can become the fully-realized person that the criminal life does not allow himself. The younger brother is looking for the love of their missing mother in the wrong place. The older sister is trapped in a loveless marriage. The younger sister wants to avoid the same fate.

It's a gangster movie, so the rural idyll cannot last. The climax will be a fight. This is inevitable in the genre, and it is perhaps the grinding inevitability that leads Suzuki to play around with the sequence stylistically. Some of what he does, such as shots from below the floor, don't really seem to do anything except arbitrarily mess with perspective. But the use of light and color and decor to create abstract, painting-like frames is very striking.