Branded To Kill
I hope I've learned to stop picking favorites by now, but it certainly can't be denied that this film occupies a pretty substantial place in the center of my film universe.

I'm not a person who loves cleverness, I'm not a person who is often successful in 'thinking about what the director is trying to say', I don't give a fuck about logical continuity and I actually think it is the death of cinema incarnate.

I'm a person who loves images, who loves directors who put things on the screen that I never in my life thought were possible with film, I love being challenged, I love being swept away, I love feeling the floor fall out beneath my feet and being lost in a film full of terrifying, sick, amusing, cool, and heart wrenching pieces of film.

I also really love guns, violence, and weird sex acts involving Japanese hit men smelling boiling rice to get hard.

These are just some of the reasons I love one part of Seijun Suzuki's two masterworks: Branded To Kill.

Like Hitchcock and so many other great filmmakers Seijun Suzuki at one point peaked with two great movies that are masterpieces of both sides of his style. With Hitchcock it was Vertigo and then North By Northwest, the directors very dark, abnormal, and emotional transcendent side and then his love of fantasy, adventure, and entertainment. Seijun Suzki mirrored Hitchcock almost exactly, except with more balls.

First came Tokyo Drifter, the quintessence of Suzuki's style as an entertainer, as a man who made films with their own worlds and amazing weird, fun, violent adventures within them. So mad and so weird that his bosses were starting to loose patience with him. Suzuki was supposed to be a B-Unit director, he was supposed to be cranking out mindless yakuza movies but along the way somewhere he got bored and started subverting every single element of his films that he could. His bosses were having none of that and warned him to shape up.

Suzuki then made Branded To Kill. His Vertigo. But with more courage than Hitchcock ever had, more abnormal than anything Hitchcock ever put on screen, more Nihlistic, sexier, more violent, way more visually inventive, way more experimental and eventually way more emotionally transcendent and way more entertaining. I've watched this film maybe 15 times? I've always seen something new. How the fuck you hide so many things in a film, a medium as unambiguous and front and center as any other conceived by man, I have no idea. After the film was released Suzuki was promptly fired and blacklisted from the industry for ten years, banished to television which is where most Japanese people now know him from, as an actor rather than a director.

The man is an enigma worth getting a lot closer to. He's often kind of hailed as a champion of style which always upset me. There's something different going on there. The situation is not helped by how insanely humble this man is, claiming that he makes films becauase that's simply his job and he makes the films he does because it's his job to entertain people. I think this is disingenuous. I think he is maybe a religiously nihilistic person who's ideals tell him that it all means nothing. He was intimately involved in the Japanese side of WWII, and experience he is often quoted as calling "comic", a war which made up for some pretty fucked up citizens after it was over, never mind veterans. I think there's something much different going on in the heart of this man and I think he really needs a Truffaut/Hitchcock style intensive interview done of him before he croaks.
( hanke murphy, I'm a mess, Sat 19 Jul 2008, 19:10, Reply)