Seijun Suzuki has throughout his long, up and down career, that started with his first feature in 1956 and is still going, made several cult classics of Japanese cinema. He'll likely be largely remembered for his earlier, off centre crime dramas, two in particular being Tokyo Drifter (1966) and Branded to Kill (1967).
Tokyo Drifter is certainly an interesting, entertaining and significant pop-icon flick of the '60s, but it's the follow up that I want to talk about here. Upon its original release Branded to Kill caused a great deal of stir and damaged the director's commercial career. Since then, the film has become a source of inspiration for various and varied filmmakers who undoubtedly have used this film and this filmmaker's techniques to enrich their own style and ideas. Three such directors who have acknowledged this are John Woo, Beat Takeshi and Jim Jarmusch (who even recreated a scene from Branded to Kill for Ghost Dog).
When I finally saw Branded to Kill I did not expect from a '60s Japanese gangster movie that it would be such a dark, demented Coen Brothers style movie, creating an almost satirical atmosphere where mythical characters merge with realistic ones, where caricatures bewilder in mundane situations and with various people standing around being all archetypal but impotent nonetheless. And all woven into a bizarre, twisted plot of betrayal and misdirection and quirky murders.
Just as equally, it was a David Lynch movie with his use of composition, lighting, weird angles, seemingly still images of characters locked into the architecture, personas overlaid on female forms of desire, illusions projected, one way or another, over decay and surrealist interior decoration. And it has Lynch's sense of sound design and his iconoclastic use of music. It also has his loving way to drape dead bodies over the domestic clutter. And all through the portentous pretension was the prankster, trickster director, laughing from deep in the back stage.
There's a scene where our anti-hero (a cold as ice hitman who gets sexually excited at the smell of cooking rice) enters the apartment of a strange face girl for whom he has become entranced. A woman that loves and hates him as he loves and hates back. He's come to kill her and she's been ordered to kill him but they end up in a bizarre ritual of threatening each other with various weapons as they struggle to make love while both are physically and emotionally inhibited (she needs dead creatures of flight and he needs that smell of rice).
And this is all happening in an apartment where the girl's bedroom is covered from floor to ceiling with moths and butterflies pinned to the walls, almost as thick as wallpaper, and her bed is made of dead birds. And at one time, in the most Cronenberg of fashions, as they are physically conjoined, a large unrealistic moth comes down from the ceiling, lands on the woman's thigh and moves along suggestively. This doesn't weird out the girl but it sure weirds out the guy. A moment where Lynch and Cronenberg merge while the Coen characters wait outside.
It was all fucking weird but it was great fun. Even the paranoia gets so intense you have to laugh at it, especially when another hitman insists our hitman anti-hero go everywhere with him arm in arm and continually promises that he'll kill him eventually.
Oh, and this is the famous movie where the butterfly lands on the hitman's rifle barrel altering the shot and changing the course of the man's life. Prior to seeing Branded I knew of the scene (Jarmusch philosophises around it for Ghost Dog) and I knew of the importance of Branded to Kill, but I did not know that the butterfly incident was from that film. So it was with obvious delight to finally witness this great moment in chaotic theory in alternative, cult cinema.
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