Crossroads (1928)
Directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa

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.

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...