Best of 2017 List

TOP 10 FILMS OF 2017
Held off on this. I haven't seen everything I wanted to that premiered in 2017 — the new ARP, the new Garrel, the new Wiseman, the new Villeneuve, other things I have blasphemously less interest in seeing. If I get more links this year I'll do better.

10.
Radiohead: “I Promise"
by Michał Marczak

9.
Snowy Bing Bongs Across the North Star Combat Zone
by Rachel Wolther and Alex H. Fischer, with Sunita Mani, Tallie Medel, and Eleanore Pienta

8.
Landline
by Gillian Robespierre

7.
Star Wars: Episode VIII: The Last Jedi
by Rian Johnson

6.
Good Time
by Josh Safdie and Benny Safdie

5.
Win It All
by Joe Swanberg

4.
Farpões baldios [Barbs Wastelands]
by Marta Mateus

3.
I Love You, Daddy
by Louis C.K.

2.
Phantom Thread
by Paul Thomas Anderson

1.
Twin Peaks: Season 3 / The Return
by David Lynch

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Underworld Beauty

"Do Diamonds Really Burn?"

(All images are iPhone photos taken of frames of the film playing off the Home Vision Entertainment DVD of the film.)

===
Over and over in Suzuki we'll see a bar or café with a backroom full of gangsters, but Underworld Beauty [Ankokugai no bijo, 1958] is the earliest example I can remember. This movie is ahead farther in its demimonde portrayals and youth-culture reckoning (equating the two at least in regard to material deemed ripe for cinema) than the French New Wave or Samuel Fuller, though the latter had staked a starting-point for the trajectory even as early as the mid-'50s.

A guy named Miyamoto (Michitarō Mizushima) gets out of jail, he was serving time over something to do with three chunky diamonds. (Mizushima is the best actor besides Jō Shishido in all the early Suzuki films.) His character visits his accomplice Mihara (Tōru Abe) who runs an oden stand with his sister Akiko (Mari Shiraki); Mihara took the fall that landed Miyamoto in prison, and now operates with a gimp leg. He was never a bad guy, and all these years has kept his head down in the business, even as Akiko flails like a dipso-nymph in capris, not unappealing. History repeats itself, Mihara swallows the diamonds, stashed all this time, in a deal led by Miyamoto that goes wrong, and takes another fall, off the side of a building in suicide — as much out of honor as to end his crippled existence. Akiko's lover Arita (Shinsuke Ashida) cuts the diamonds from Mihara's shrouded gullet during the vigil he holds with the body on behalf of himself and the sister, who has gone off to cope by getting shitfaced with an American sailor. When she comes back to the hospital, she cracks open Mihara's coffin and pours whiskey all over the corpse's face.

Eventually she'll come into the diamonds and tamp them down into the clay of a pre-fired mannequin's tit.

The final ten minutes find Akiko and Miyamoto ("ojisan") locked in the competitors' basement, the bad guys shooting up boiler tanks and the protagonists forced to shovel coal out a shaft to free up an escape-route. Akiko emerges onto the street; Miyamoto gets gunned down bare-backed by a detective after his offing of big-boss Ōyane (actor who?). The ending sees Miyamoto recovering in a hospital bed with the implication that he and Akiko may get something hot started yet before his time to serve. Somehow, she, and this movie, constitute an Underworld Beauty. •

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More writing at Cinemasparagus on the films of Seijun Suzuki:

Ankokugai no bijo [Underworld Beauty, 1958]

Fumi hazushita hara [Trampled Springtime, 1958]

Kage naki koe [Voice Without a Shadow, 1958]

"Jûsan-gô taihisen," yori: Sono gosôsha (w)o nerae ["Sidetrack No. Thirteen," or: Take Aim at That Police Van, 1960]

Kemono no nemuri [The Sleep of the Beast, 1960]

Subete ga kurutteru [Everything Goes Wrong, 1960]

Tōge (w)o wataru wakai kaze [Youthful Wind Crossing the Mountain Pass, 1961]

High-teen yakuza [Late-Teen Yakuza, 1962]

Yajû no seishun [Youth of the Beast, 1963]

Akutarō [The Bastard / The Badboy, 1963]

Akutarō-den: Warui hoshi no shita demo [Stories of Bastards: Even Under a Bad Star / Stories of Badboys: Even Under a Bad Star, 1965]
===

The Bastard

New-Kid-in-Town Monogatari

(All images are details from iPhone photos taken of the film playing from the Arrow Blu-ray as included in the boxset Seijun Suzuki: The Early Years: Vol. 1: Seijun Rising: The Youth Movies.)

===
The Taishō period. Akutarō [The Bastard, maybe also The Badboy, I don't know where to come down definitively in this translation conflict, 1963] was the nickname of Tōgo Konno (Ken Yamauchi) at his former secondary-school in Kobe, where he attended as the son of a widower with upper-middle-class means before the boy's mother pulled him out to enroll him in small-town Toyooka. The Public Morals Unit, comprised of his upper-classmen, don't take kindly to strangers in dandy hakama...

It's easy to see how, in comparison to Suzuki's contemporaneous works, The Bastard might be considered, and too happily so by dilettante critics, as a prestige picture in the sense of Ford's The Informer [1935] or Naruse's Floating Clouds [Ukigumo, 1955] — both films I love, but they're well-rounded in romantic-vision and certain production values and non-angular pacings on the way to denouements (also see Mizoguchi's Sanshō-dayū [Sanshō the Steward, 1954]) that institutional awards-services might recognize them over not only the termite entries of the respective œuvres but the more stylistically flamboyant popular pictures that still draw attention in retrospectives and reissues today. That's fine. Life could be worse than experiencing masterpieces like The Informer, Floating Clouds, Sanshō-dayū, or maybe not a masterpiece but stark cinema, The Bastard. Why don't I say this is not a Suzuki masterpiece? I don't know — why haven't I said any of the films that precede it are? Some are better than this; many of those I still haven't seen (have you looked at Suzuki's filmography?); this movie's just different from what came before, and as such, and in and of itself, it's fascinating. Blob Saget was on Seth Meyers last night and he said that his show should be eventually called Fullest House when his ashes rest in an urn on a sill.

If you haven't yet seen The Bastard know that the biggest conceit involves August Strindberg's 1879 novel The Red Room [Röda rummet]. I've never read it, and didn't even know except in a few forgotten whisperings that Strindberg wrote novels — I figure this is something like how most people into Dostoevsky haven't read Poor Folk [Bednye lyudi, 1846] — but I paste this excerpt off Wikipedia from the American critic John Albert Macy in 1922: "[Strindberg] writes of [his characters' — two young critics'] unconscious inhumanity and blindness in a way that reveals his own clearness of vision and fundamental humanity. The laughter of a somber humorist has in it a tenderness unknown to merry natures." Make of that what you will.

I like the irony in the film title quite a more than a bit: with regard to Strindberg in his time of play, and with Suzuki's naming the picture The Bastard, or The Badboy, as both represent only ironical side-offerings to the straight denomination. Tōgo's a good-seed by any standard; in typical Japanese social critique of the era, it's truly the oppressors surrounding him that will drive him to pull daggers, abscond in spit — both tough attitudes. He's another drifter-savior in the Suzuki work, here of course in the guise of the transfer-student, fighting a de facto student-gestapo — the extreme manifestation in cinema of the dreams of the scenarists and Suzuki's own perceptions. The picture ends like something in a Satyajit Ray film, something from his Apu Trilogy.

In the essay that comes with the 60-page book in this Arrow boxset, writer Jasper Sharp quotes something to the effect by Shigehiko Hasumi that here everything came together for Suzuki for the first time: the actors, assistant-directors, production-designer, the cinematographer: — they made a prestige picture. As Variety would say: All tech specs primo. But who cares except season-passing 90-year-olds in the faintest of rushes to that last 90-min of distracted distraction, padded heeled, unaware of imminent pulmonary terror? •

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Ankokugai no bijo [Underworld Beauty, 1958]

Fumi hazushita hara [Trampled Springtime, 1958]

Kage naki koe [Voice Without a Shadow, 1958]

"Jûsan-gô taihisen," yori: Sono gosôsha (w)o nerae ["Sidetrack No. Thirteen," or: Take Aim at That Police Van, 1960]

Kemono no nemuri [The Sleep of the Beast, 1960]

Subete ga kurutteru [Everything Goes Wrong, 1960]

Tōge (w)o wataru wakai kaze [Youthful Wind Crossing the Mountain Pass, 1961]

High-teen yakuza [Late-Teen Yakuza, 1962]

Yajû no seishun [Youth of the Beast, 1963]

Akutarō [The Bastard / The Badboy, 1963]

Akutarō-den: Warui hoshi no shita demo [Stories of Bastards: Even Under a Bad Star / Stories of Badboys: Even Under a Bad Star, 1965]
===

Late-Teen Yakuza

Rue Teens!

(All images are details from iPhone photos taken of the film playing from the Arrow Blu-ray as included in the boxset Seijun Suzuki: The Early Years: Vol. 1: Seijun Rising: The Youth Movies.)

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Late-Teen Yakuza [High-teen yakuza, 1962 — aka Teenage Yakuza] unfolds upon images of construction vehicles clearing out rocks and soil dumped over ridges. For, this movie is jazz, goddammit, not your ersatz pre-Beatle rock-'n-roll: the benefitting kids want only Art Farmer, Louis Armstrong, and Don Elliott!, can't you see!, like any other Anglo brand hung on a peg! "Robin Coffee Brought to You by Chimoto," the franchise café the mother of schoolboy Jirō (Tamio Kawachi) is opening up in tandem with the expansion of this extra-Tokyo growth in small-business economic rise-of-promise: a playset for shrewd Suzuki four years before Godard's more cosmologically cogent focus on the Paris banlieues in 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her [2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle, 1966]. Sprinkle their faces with sea-salt or not — the shots are all diurnal! Aside from the brilliant framings and sets, a terribly ugly film... the bastard bleaching sunlight... it exposes the cowards and conformists that Jirō defends against and the extortionist delinquents he ATTACKS! in fending off this multi-block plot for which the owners thought they were signing up in solace to hunker over in perpetuity on the heels of the war...

Fictional teens cry and hiccup for the power to loaf! They might extort protection money from the conformist-cowards who took out business-loans, but Jirō comes round to offer real protection kicking the would-be-yakuzas' asses all over the curbs, arm-blocking every ridiculous haymaker-right-hook before he socks them impermanently to the dust.

Two beautiful details, that most present-day directors are incapable of equaling in their films:

(1) A cop manning a one-man-barracks, whose wife and toddler are visiting during Jirō and his buddy Yoshio's (Toshio Sugiyama) questioning. After the cop dismisses the two to go home, maybe half-an-hour later in the film, the next time we return to him (because films and scenarios work at the power of twice, not three-times), he's dandling his toddler solo near the plants before the keisatsu bungalow. And:

(2) Kazuko (Midori Tashiro) speeds into her father's udon/soba shop to make a plea, and like a pied-piper, the most popular girl in town because maybe the shittiest, all her friends follow her and clog up the windows in the background to gawk.

Late-Teen Yakuza is a beautiful and short (1 hour 12 minute) movie, and I only wish it might have ended differently: with Yoshio having already been crippled in the leg, and Jirō having suffered a similar maiming from a blade in the same spot — my wish, my wish... is that when they reconcile and pedal bicycles together during the final shot ————— both might only operate the pedals with their left feet and their right legs dangling numb off the frames... •

===
More writing at Cinemasparagus on the films of Seijun Suzuki:

Ankokugai no bijo [Underworld Beauty, 1958]

Fumi hazushita hara [Trampled Springtime, 1958]

Kage naki koe [Voice Without a Shadow, 1958]

"Jûsan-gô taihisen," yori: Sono gosôsha (w)o nerae ["Sidetrack No. Thirteen," or: Take Aim at That Police Van, 1960]

Subete ga kurutteru [Everything Goes Wrong, 1960]

Tōge (w)o wataru wakai kaze [Youthful Wind Crossing the Mountain Pass, 1961]

High-teen yakuza [Late-Teen Yakuza, 1962]

Yajû no seishun [Youth of the Beast, 1963]

Akutarō [The Bastard / The Badboy, 1963]

Akutarō-den: Warui hoshi no shita demo [Stories of Bastards: Even Under a Bad Star / Stories of Badboys: Even Under a Bad Star, 1965]
===

Youthful Wind Crossing the Mountain Pass

Variety Show

(All images are details from iPhone photos taken of the film playing from the Arrow Blu-ray as included in the boxset Seijun Suzuki: The Early Years: Vol. 1: Seijun Rising: The Youth Movies.)

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It takes Shintarō (Kōji Wada), an economics student on sabbatical passing through a mountain village, to get the Imai Kinyō Traveling Magic Show's mojo back on track. The drifter-savior, if only there ultimately to inspire Misako Imai (Mayumi Shimizu) to follow her dream of resigning from the troupe and moving to Tokyo. A dream she'll abandon at the film's end! Youthful Wind Crossing the Mountain Pass [Tōge (w)o wataru wakai kaze, 1961 — somewhere along the line it got aka'd The Wind-of-Youth Group Crosses the Mountain] abounds with frustrated dreams, the funniest being the yakuza prohibited from killing his mark, and troupe leader Kinyō himself (Shin Morikawa) botching his projected showstopper during practice and drowning in a submerged trunk. Escape for Tokyo, escape à la Houdini, even in the case of the yakuza's mark escape through the honor of death — in the end, there's no escape at all.

A neglected treasure in Suzuki's career, Youthful Wind Crossing the Mountain Pass examines the underlying absurdity of entertaining audiences with cheap spectacle, whether that be a third-rate magic-and-striptease production, or the barking at fairground passers-by to take a chance on discounted ladies' bloomers. Like the Imai ensemble itself, Youthful Wind, and Suzuki, are caught in a transitional time bound up with tricks and strippers, mercenary promoters and gangster associates. It was this filmmaker's charge to satisfy his audience, that of the Japanese cinema of '61.•

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More writing at Cinemasparagus on the films of Seijun Suzuki:

Ankokugai no bijo [Underworld Beauty, 1958]

Fumi hazushita hara [Trampled Springtime, 1958]

Kage naki koe [Voice Without a Shadow, 1958]

"Jûsan-gô taihisen," yori: Sono gosôsha (w)o nerae ["Sidetrack No. Thirteen," or: Take Aim at That Police Van, 1960]

Subete ga kurutteru [Everything Goes Wrong, 1960]

Tōge (w)o wataru wakai kaze [Youthful Wind Crossing the Mountain Pass, 1961]

High-teen yakuza [Late-Teen Yakuza, 1962]

Yajû no seishun [Youth of the Beast, 1963]

Akutarō [The Bastard / The Badboy, 1963]

Akutarō-den: Warui hoshi no shita demo [Stories of Bastards: Even Under a Bad Star / Stories of Badboys: Even Under a Bad Star, 1965]
===

Voice Without a Shadow

She Has the Ability to Distinguish Between 300 Voices

(All images are details from iPhone photos taken of the film playing from the Arrow Blu-ray as included in the collection Nikkatsu Diamond Guys: Volume 1.)

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"Born in Tokyo, it was assumed Suzuki would take over his father's bicycle bell-making business...."
—from Stuart Galbraith IV's essay "Voices Behind the Shadow" [2016]

I haven't come across many chroniclers of the early years of Suzuki's career who will admit that the respective films are not just entertaining genre programmers but indeed stand apart from other, albeit excellent, Nikkatsu works of the era — example: Toshio Masuda's Red Pier [Akai hatoba, 1958], also included in the Arrow set. Take Voice Without a Shadow [Kage naki koe, 1958]: it's got all mod cons: bicycle bells, dog whistles...

Asako Takahashi-Kotani works as a switchboard operator at the Maichō Shinbun. (Yôko Minamida plays Asako, whose character does not, as far as we might surmise via common practice of the time, officially carry a hyphenate-surname; she's referred to alternately with both surnames by Ishikawa, a newspaper journalist played by Diamond Guy Hideaki Nitani who knew her in earlier days.) When Ishikawa requests she connect him from the newsroom to an outside line, she plugs into the wrong number, belonging to a pawnshop where a crime in-progress can be overheard in the background as one of the perpetrators answers the phone and taunts the operator, two noh masks gazing down upon her from a calendar posted on the wall. Three years and one noh mask later, she'll recognize the crook's voice at last, now that it's emitting again from a telephone receiver: it's her husband's shifty mahjongg pal Hamazaki (Jō Shishido), who's become a fixture at the game nights her spouse has been strong-armed into hosting and pissing away his and Asako's paltry savings upon.

The latter two-thirds of the film deal with Hamazaki's murder committed shortly after Asako's epiphany, and Ishikawa's procedural gumshoeing to discover the guilty party. The clues hinge upon a specific variety of coal-dust found near the Kotani residence that's found smudged on Hamazaki's suit and within his autopsied lungs. It's later revealed that these are planted specimens: the dust in his lungs got wafted down his windpipe by way of a handfan brandished directly before his strangulated face by devil-vixen Mari (Midori Ishizuka) who, earlier the same night of Hamazaki's murder, will sit on a parlor floor and playact the choking of a pet dog before tearing the feathers off a mangy fowl.

Anyway, in the end everything's tied up in a bow, and Ishikawa gets the killer.

I'd draw attention to Suzuki's inspired technique and impeccable staging. The production design is first-rate, specifically the cramped confines of the Kotani household and the labyrinth of Mari's bungalow. There's the ill-boding flashback sequence tipped off by the framing of each shot with a canted angle, and the three-shot distorted in a shattered mirror. Lastly, a prime example of Suzuki's endeavor of keeping everything interesting through camera placement and blocking: e.g., Asako erupts into tears while engaging with Ishikawa at a café and bursts out onto the sidewalk: cut to exterior, camera on the door, Ishikawa rushes out, pauses. Pedestrians pass. It's raining... •

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More writing at Cinemasparagus on the films of Seijun Suzuki:

Ankokugai no bijo [Underworld Beauty, 1958]

Fumi hazushita hara [Trampled Springtime, 1958]

Kage naki koe [Voice Without a Shadow, 1958]

"Jûsan-gô taihisen," yori: Sono gosôsha (w)o nerae ["Sidetrack No. Thirteen," or: Take Aim at That Police Van, 1960]

Subete ga kurutteru [Everything Goes Wrong, 1960]

Tōge (w)o wataru wakai kaze [Youthful Wind Crossing the Mountain Pass, 1961]

High-teen yakuza [Late-Teen Yakuza, 1962]

Yajû no seishun [Youth of the Beast, 1963]

Akutarō [The Bastard / The Badboy, 1963]

Akutarō-den: Warui hoshi no shita demo [Stories of Bastards: Even Under a Bad Star / Stories of Badboys: Even Under a Bad Star, 1965]
===

Trampled Springtime

Bulletin Board System Nikkatsu

(All images are details from iPhone photos taken of the film playing from the Arrow Blu-ray as included in the boxset Seijun Suzuki: The Early Years: Vol. 1: Seijun Rising: The Youth Movies.)

===
There's high and low camera angles, juvenile delinquency even if approached like F-Troop, transposed though to cool, and the general spectacularization of violence. This is Suzuki in his very early years, setting himself apart from the other directors at the Nikkatsu studio not only by the audacity of implementing the shooting-script but by the suppleness and originality of his mise-en-scène that makes every shot come to life. Call to arms among rival gangs. Nobody knows this movie as Trampled Springtime: that's my translation of the original Japanese title, Fumi hazushita hara [1958], which has also been translated as The Spring That Didn't Come and, poorly as it's not even a translation, The Boy Who Came Back.

AIDE-MÉMOIRE: Keiko (Sachiko Hidari) is a newly recruited case-officer (on an extracurricular basis!) taking on her first file to assist in reforming Nobuo Kasahara (Akira Kobayashi, Nikkatsu's mega-pated, non-syncopated Jerry). The story that ensues recalls Sirk's Shockproof, with major differences.

Nobuo "throttled his dad with a necktie and induced a mass escape" from his previous reformatory, although if the images beneath the opening credits are anything to go on, this isn't quite the situation. He's got a girl named Kazue (Ruriko Asaoka), she the source of his trouble because Kajita (Jô Shishido) planted his lips on her and Nobuo went apeshit. Now free after a grueling five months or whatever, Nobuo will be guided to and fro Kazue, a schoolteacher with as gentle a demeanor as the reformist. But the bad seeds are lingering around Nobuo once again and Kajita's beer-glass is glinting in the sun.

Keiko wants Nobuo (who affectionately calls her "nee-chan" or "sister") to take up a job at his mother's workplace — she's the janitor, widow to an abusive husband... Nobuo summarily rejects the offer. He fights two of the officemates drunk at a bar. Unusual eyelines in the shots leading up to the violence. Keiko's the co-dependent angel: "I'll come up with some way to save him."

And maybe she — or rather Kazue — does, by furnishing Nobuo with the art supplies he's needed to long to make a go of a career, entryway street-caricaturist. Kazue gets duped into entering a bar where in a backroom Kajita and company attempt to chloroform and gang-rape her: a cop present gets suspicious at the comings-and-goings to the room and bursts through to break it up, upon which the gang absconds only to beat hell, an hour or so later, out of Nobuo returning with his drawing supplies in the Tokyo rain. He gets brought in for questioning and Keiko helps him beat the rap (the gang's pinning on Nobuo the chloroform-rape of Kazue — which it turns out was prevented in the nick of time). A strolling designer found his hand-painted necktie in a puddle and wants to offer him a job. Kazue and he meet up as Keiko looks on from a distance. FIN DE L'AIDE-MÉMOIRE •

===
More writing at Cinemasparagus on the films of Seijun Suzuki:

Ankokugai no bijo [Underworld Beauty, 1958]

Fumi hazushita hara [Trampled Springtime, 1958]

Kage naki koe [Voice Without a Shadow, 1958]

"Jûsan-gô taihisen," yori: Sono gosôsha (w)o nerae ["Sidetrack No. Thirteen," or: Take Aim at That Police Van, 1960]

Subete ga kurutteru [Everything Goes Wrong, 1960]

Tōge (w)o wataru wakai kaze [Youthful Wind Crossing the Mountain Pass, 1961]

High-teen yakuza [Late-Teen Yakuza, 1962]

Yajû no seishun [Youth of the Beast, 1963]

Akutarō [The Bastard / The Badboy, 1963]

Akutarō-den: Warui hoshi no shita demo [Stories of Bastards: Even Under a Bad Star / Stories of Badboys: Even Under a Bad Star, 1965]
===