Inju, la bête dans l’ombre (2008) - film review

Alex Fayard, a successful writer of crime fiction, arrives in Japan to promote his latest book.  He takes advantage of this visit to look up Shundei Oe, the celebrated Japanese writer who inspired him in his career.   Oe is a renowned recluse, a strange man that virtually no one knows, although his books suggest he is someone with a perverse and dangerous imagination.  In Kyoto, Alex is irresistibly drawn to beautiful Geisha named Tamao, who has received death threats from her former lover...

A tongue-in-cheek commentary on how the west exploits Japanese culture for its own shallow ends or a Nippon-flavoured film noir that is intended merely to divert with its lurid eroticism and sado-masochistic thrills?   Inju, la bête dans l’ombre is a multi-faceted little oddity of a film that somehow manages to slot in all the clichés about Japanese culture without itself appearing clichéd.  The film is one of the more unusual offerings from director-producer and one-time critic on the Cahiers du cinéma Barbet Schroeder, one that allows him to indulge his longheld fascination for all things Japanese whilst proving that, at 66, he hasn’t yet lost his knack of turning out imaginative and stylish genre flicks.        

The film was inspired by the 1928 novel Inju by the celebrated Japanese thriller writer Edogawa Ranpo.   The mysterious reclusive writer in the film, Shundei Oe, is closely based on Ranpo, an author who, whilst greatly admired if not adulated by the public, was something of a monster in real life.  An obvious fan of Japanese cinema, Schroeder pays homage not only to chambara (the sword-fighting genre of Japanese cinema) with a stylish and suitably gory opening sequence but also to Western and Oriental variants of film noir, achieving a synthesis of styles that is both eye-catching and eerily atmospheric.  

The only area where the film falls down is its plot, which drags us down an all too predictable course, before collapsing wearily with the typical B-movie denouement.  It doesn’t help that the central protagonist (a pretentious young writer who loves himself far too much) fails spectacularly to gain our sympathies, partly because Benoît Magimel’s portrayal is so lacking in charm and substance that you really don’t care what happens to him.   Fortunately, the contributions from the Japanese cast members are far more nuanced and convincing (Lika Minamoto is stunning as the ex-Geisha) and this, along with Schroeder’s unfalteringly slick mise-en-scène and some moody cinematography, prevents us from dwelling too much on the mechanical plot.  The end result is not entirely satisfying but it is strangely compelling, one of the most haunting and visually alluring examples of French film noir in recent years.

© James Travers 2011

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