乾いた花 / Pale Flower

(Movie Review)

Why I Watched This Movie

            I watched this movie because a co-worker of mine was watching it.

            I have a co-worker who is a real film buff.  He was a film studies major in university, and is one of those people who is always seeking out obscure artsy foreign films to watch.

            Recently he told me he was planning to watch this movie over the weekend. He described it as a Japanese film noir from the 1960s.  The reason he wanted to watch it was because Roger Ebert had added this movie to his list of the greatest films of all time, and had given it a glowing review on his website [For Roger Ebert’s review of this film see here.]

            I told him, “If you watch it, give me a call.  I’ll bring the popcorn.”

           It’s good for me to watch a Japanese language movie every now and then.  Since leaving Japan 3 years ago, my Japanese ability has deteriorated rapidly, and watching the occasional Japanese film helps me from forgetting everything completely. 

            (Actually I really should be watching a lot more Japanese films  than I am.  However I often find Japanese cinema a struggle to sit through for one reason or another.  Whereas American cinema knows exactly how to cater to my short attention span.  So whenever I’m in the video store, unless I’m feeling particularly conscientious, I almost always find myself gravitating towards the movies that are easiest for me to understand.)

           But the fact that a friend was watching this movie anyway gave me the perfect excuse to watch it with him.  But there were a couple other factors that drew me in: classic - film - noir - is a genre that I have some interest in , plus I’ve always been interested in - 1960s - era - Japan.

The Review

            Three of us ended up watching the film together.  When it was over, my friend talked about how beautiful the cinematography was.

            “Yes, the cinematography was pretty impressive,” I said.  “But what about that story?  There was hardly any story, and what little story there was didn’t make a lot of sense, and the story got drawn out way more than it needed to be.  The film was only 90 minutes, but am I the only one who felt like it seemed to last way longer than that?”

            “Yes, but it’s film noir,” my friend replied.  “Film noir has always been about style over substance.”

            There are probably lots of cinephiles around the world who love films like this that put so much emphasis on style.  And if you’re one of those people, you’ll probably love this film.  But I’m not one of them.  Here I must confess myself a philistine, and probably someone unqualified to review this film.  Really, you should stop wasting your time reading my review, and just follow the above link to Roger Ebert’s review.  You’ll get much more out of it.

            However, since I am committed to putting down my two-cents on every movie I watch, here are my thoughts.

The Style

            If it is true that film noir is always about style over substance, then it must be admitted that this film does have style.  It’s a gangster film, and the gangsters do a good job of looking cool.  They wear nice looking suits, smoke cigarettes, and regard the world with cool disdain.

            The yakuza (Japanese mafia) in the 1960s, at least as far as their portrayal on film goes, look just like a Japanese business man—short hair, nice suit, carefully pressed pants.  The only thing that seems to distinguish their uniform is the dark sunglasses some of them wear, even at night.

            Almost the entire film takes place at night, and the film makes good use of the loneliness of night.  You have lots of shots of characters walking alone down empty alley streets.

            But there is also an intimacy about the night.  When the whole world is asleep, it seems like you and the person you are with are the only two people who seem alive at the moment.  The film makes good use of this as well.

            The film opens with a voice over complaining about how crowded Tokyo has become.  But then after several opening shots establishing the crowds in Tokyo, Tokyo is then portrayed as looking deserted for most of the rest of the film.  At night the characters have the streets of Tokyo entirely to themselves.

            And then there’s the excitement of the night.  When most decent people are in bed, it seems like there are no rules and anything can happen.

           At one point the heroine exclaims, “I would be okay if the morning never comes.  I live for these evil nights.”  As she says this, she presses down on the accelerator and, for no reason except mischief, engages in a race on the highway with the car in front of her.  At night they have the entire highway to themselves, and it ends eventually when the other driver stops, laughs with them as if they were good friends, and then just drives off again.

            Other stylistic points:

            * I suppose it’s cliché to say about any black and white film noir that they make good use of light and shadows.  But there is some good use of light and shadows here.  The character at points walks in and out of shadows while walking down the street.  And in one of the opening scenes, his embrace with his girlfriend is totally obscured by the shadows, leaving the audience to just guess what is happening.

           

            * Also the sound of footsteps are amplified a lot in this movie.  Whenever any character walks anywhere, you can hear very loudly the “click, click, click,” sound of their shoes on the streets. 

            Exactly why this is, I’m not sure.  It might again have to do with the emptiness of night, where in the absence of the usual daily noise, the small noise of footsteps seems louder.

            Or maybe, as Roger Ebert seems to be hinting, the rhythmic sound of the footsteps on the pavement is meant to parallel the rhythmic clicking of the picture plaques being shuffled in the gambling scenes.

           Or my friend thought the footsteps represented the ticking of the clocks.  Which brings me to my next point.

            * There is definitely some clock symbolism here.  One of the characters works and lives in a clock store.  In one particularly obvious scene, her lover comes home from prison, and, amid the loud clicking of clocks she asks him, “When did you get out?  When? When? When?”

            Aside from just symbolism for the sake of symbolism, however, I’m not sure how this connects with the themes of the rest of the story.  But maybe someone a bit sharper than me can make the connection.

Okay, so much for the style.  Now onto the story.

The Story

            There’s really not much of a story here, and what little story there is gets drawn out over some very slow scenes.

            A gangster named Muraki gets released from prison, and immediately returns to his old life and his old hangouts. 

            At his usual gambling dens, however, he is surprised to find a young innocent rich girl gambling alongside the usual gangsters.  No one knows why she is here or what her story is.  He is intrigued by her, and then becomes in love with her, and she with him.

            But fate has them on different trajectories.  Because of his loyalties to his gang, he engages in a job that he knows will send him right back to jail, while she meanwhile is on a self-destructive path, chasing more and more dangerous ways to escape her boredom.

            (Actually, now that I’ve just written it up like that, it sounds a lot more exciting than it actually is.  But the film moves very slowly.  The action of the film maybe takes up only about 15 minutes, all told, and the rest of the film is people having quiet conversations with each other.  Because of this, the film felt very long to me, even though it was really only 90 minutes.)

            Why he falls so in love with this girl I never understood, and that hampered my getting involved with the story.

            She is cute, yes, I’ll give her that.  And she does looks up at him with a doe-y eyed look, and she talks very innocently and correctly, and obviously comes from a high class family, and there is a mystery about her.

            But cute girls are a dime-a-dozen, and she doesn’t seem to have any deeper personality than this.  Plus she gives several indications that she’s real trouble.  She already has a gambling addiction when he meets her, and then she is becoming fascinated by drugs.  With all the girls in the world, why would you fall in love with this one? 

            Especially for a middle aged man who should know better.  (I understand in our young years, men can be intrigued by girls like this.  But surely by the time we reach a certain age, we realize that they are more trouble than they’re worth, right?)

            To my mind, the movie gives absolutely no reason why he should fall in love with her.  It’s simply something we need to accept so that there can be some sort of story here.

            (My friend, by the way, disagrees with me on this.  He says it was obvious from the movie that they both have very similar personalities, and they both have trouble connecting to the real world, so the only person each could open up to was the other.  Perhaps.)

            At any rate, I certainly wasn’t in love with her by the end of the movie, and so it irritated me that he should be so in love with her.  I wasn’t able to sympathize with his feelings at all.

            And there were other things like this—other characters who made abrupt emotional turn arounds I did not understand.　There was the young gangster (Jiro?) who hates our main character Muraki and tries to kill him at the beginning of the film.  For reasons I never understood, a few scenes later he has become his devoted follower and companion.

            I’m not saying an emotional transformation from hatred to love couldn’t have taken place, but the film certainly didn’t show me it or give me any reason to believe it.

Other Thoughts

            And in now particular order, here are a few more things that are rattling around my brain.

* I am reminded of the Showa News Reel clips I watched a few years back.  The news reels from the 1960s also made a big deal about how crowded Tokyo was becoming, indicating that overcrowding in Tokyo was becoming an issue very much on the public consciousness around this time.  (Tokyo is still very crowded now, but perhaps now it’s just accepted as a fact, and back then it was a new phenomenon.)

            Assuming I’m right about this, then the opening narration of the movie, which complains about the overcrowding in Tokyo, locates this movie perfectly in its time.

* And speaking of dating this movie to its time period—is it just me, or during the 1950s and 60s were there a lot of stories about bored upper-middle class young people trying to “get their kicks”, feel alive, find meaning in life, et cetera?  And if so, does that young-bored-and restless feeling still exist today, or have we become completely lulled into passivity by media saturation?

* Other observations from my friend, the cinephile:

            He said the film has a very claustrophobic feel, created by showing lots of characters crammed into small rooms, and by having lots of close-ups of characters faces.  (I never noticed this myself.)

            He said that it was very obvious the director Shinoda is a protégé of Ozu because they both make a habit of making sure the whole room, from the floor to the ceiling, is in the shot.  (I never noticed this myself either.)

* Roger Ebert’s review gives a bit of information both me and my friend found interesting.  Apparently the original screenplay did not include any of the elaborate gambling scenes in the movie, and instead the only screen directions were “they gambled.” 

            The fact that the director took these very simple screen directions and made very elaborate gambling scenes does add another layer of interest to the movie.  The fact that the screenwriter was not happy about this, but apparently became furious when he saw the film and saw how elaborate the gambling scenes had become, is more interesting yet.

* One of the key plot points in the movie is when someone runs in and informs the gang that Tamaki has been knifed down in the streets.  This caused me and my two friends to turn to each other and ask, “Who is Tamaki?”  We still haven’t figured it out.

* “Film noir has always been about style over substance,” says my friend.  Me— I’m not entirely sure that’s true.  Surely the classic film noirs in American cinema were just as famous for their dialogues as their cinematography?  Or does dialogue also count as style?

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Pale Flower: Movie Review (Scripted)