Film Review
Encouraged by the enthusiastic reaction from the critics to his first independently
made film
A Page of Madness
(1926), the 32-year-old director Teinosuke Kinugasa attempted another, this
time with more of an eye to mainstream sensibilities. Originally released
in Japan as
Jujiro, but known to the English-speaking world as
Crossroads
or
Slums of Tokyo, Kinugasa's second independent feature again strongly
shows the influence of the European avant-garde but it is constructed more
as a traditional
jidai-geki (period) melodrama, with a plot that looks
more likely to have been conceived for a kabuki theatre than the cinema (with
performances to match).
In its subject matter,
Jujiro is fairly conventional fare for 1920s
Japanese cinema, but it is how Kinugasa approaches his banal subject and
gives it a heightened sense of reality that makes it so interesting and so
emotionally involving. The director had already exploited the techniques
of both German expressionism and French impressionism to stunning effect
in
A Page of Madness, visualising the disturbed psychological states
of his protagonists with a chilling degree of veracity. In
Jujiro,
he does the same, but with more restraint, combining the subjective camera
and impressionistic/expressionistic devices to convey the extreme vulnerability
of his two main characters as the world literally closes in on them and chews
them up.
The film's sets depicting a slum district of what we now know as Tokyo would
not be out of place in a German expressionistic horror film, and the high
contrast cinematography (which has much of the field of view plunged in abject
darkness) creates a similar impression. Dissolute and disreputable
secondary characters are made more frightening by being shot from unusual
angles, and the rogues' gallery of toothless, cackling slum lowlife is enough
to send a cold shiver down anyone's spine. The generous serving of
slow pans and tracking shots, combined with a liberal use of superimposition
and some jarring edits, give the film a startling dynamism, simultaneously
evoking the debauched vitality of the Red District setting and the wild delirium
of obsessive desire that has already taken over the leading male protagonist,
the good-for-nothing brother Rikiya.
Most striking is the sequence in which Rikiya is blinded by the man he gets
into a fight with. At the fatal moment, the screen explodes in a mêlée
of abstract shapes and as Rikiya's sight is taken from him the image of a
spinning ball (a recurring motif in the film) fills the screen. The
sequence barely last a few seconds but it has a searing impact and you are
at once filled with a nauseating horror of the unremittingly bleak world
in which Rikiya and his devoted sister Okiku are forced to live. Even
though Rikiya's misfortunes are self-imposed, we are still moved by his gradual
descent into hell, but it is the unblemished, unstintingly faithful Okiku
that we end up weeping for - she is a flickering candle of hope in a landscape
of utter depravity and selfishness. The power of those who intend
to benefit from Okiku's escalating woes - a loathsome creep dribbling with lust
and a hag-like trader in prostitutes - is magnified to harrowing proportions by enormous
close-ups which make them look more like vile predatory fiends than human
beings. The stalking horrors in
Nosferatu
and
The Cabinet of
Dr Caligari are mild in comparison.
Despite the conventionality of its subject matter,
Jujiro is an extraordinarily
disturbing film, for the simple reason that it shows suffering not from an
external viewpoint, but from the perspective of the victim. The
sense of desolation that Okiku feels at the end of the film is utterly devastating,
and indeed it is hard to name another film with such a totally pessimistic
ending. If Kinugasa had played safe and gone for a more conventional
cinematic style,
Jujiro would be no more than a routine melodrama,
indistinguishable from the hundreds of such films that were churned out in
Japan in the 1920s. It is because of its harsh psychological realism
- achieved through skilful appropriation of techniques developed by Kinugasa's
European contemporaries (Abel Gance, Marcel Lherbier, Robert Wiene, F.W.
Murnau) - that the film has such a profound and lasting impact.
Today,
Jujiro is rightly judged to be an avant-garde masterpiece,
one of the most daring and imaginatively crafted Japanese films of the silent
era. When it was first seen in Europe in 1928, the film did garner some very
favourable reviews, but it struggled to make any money, both at home and
abroad. Kinugasa's dreams of being an independent, world-renowned cineaste
died with this film and for the rest of his career he would be on the payroll
of Japan's leading film studios, first Shochiku, then Daiei. Ironically,
it was for a film that he made for Daiei towards the end of his long and
productive career that he is now best known, the Oscar winning
Gate of Hell (1953) - another
seductively lurid study in destructive obsession.
© James Travers 2016
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Film Synopsis
In the 18th century, a young man named Rikiya lives with his sister Okiku
in a cheap rented apartment in the Red Light district of Edo. As she
struggles to support them both by repairing clothes, he leads a debauched
life in town and becomes infatuated with a beautiful geisha, O-ume.
Unfortunately, several other men are also interested in O-ume and Rikiya
makes a habit of getting into fights with his rivals. In one such fight,
he is blinded when his opponent hurls hot ash into his eyes, and he retaliates
in a murderous frenzy. Convinced he has killed his rival, Rikiya returns
to his sister, who is at once alarmed by her brother's blindness and the
fact he has murdered a respectable man. The only way out of this calamitous
situation is for Okiku to obtain money, but where from? A greedy procuress
and lecherous neighbour are quick to exploit her misfortune...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.