By Alexander Penn.
Yamamoto’s bluesy, folkloric score plays like a eulogy in Branded to Kill’s opening scenes. Puffy-cheeked protagonist, Hanada (Joe Shishido), and a beautiful woman, are driven from the airport by his Yakuza-tied chauffeur. “Who’s the woman?”, the chauffeur asks. “She’s my wife,”, Hanada replies. With a little surprise on the chauffeur’s face, he accepts it. Hanada’s clearly got himself a new beau on his travels. These first lines acquaint you with this gangster noir’s tone of sultry instability and mortal weakness.
The minimal opening works well to downplay Hanada’s not-so-minimal fetish – the smell of boiled rice. As a high-end Yakuza assassin, the frailty of a kinky sexual obsession is bound to threaten the cold focus needed to do the organisation’s murderous bidding. Early on, in a clumsily-choreographed shootout scene, we get a sense of what this film’s about – human weakness versus animalistic, and predatory, instinct.
When Hanada botches an assassination job, he’s hunted down by the Yakuza to pay for his fallibility. During this chase, he encounters his true love, femme fatale Misako (Annu Marii) and slowly sinks into his tortured mind. This is an attractive concept, and it’s frequently attractively executed. The beguiling visuals argue a good case for director, Seijun Suzuki, to be named the Japanese Bertolucci. Artful perspective shifts, like a shot of Misako’s reflection in the window to give the illusion she’s being rained on, blur the line between dream and reality. The canvas-worthy long shots and the smoky erotica sequences have an eccentric elegance – an art-house feel quite unlike the promise of a gritty gangster flick. However, the smart and slick camera-work wasn’t enough to dupe me into thinking this film was well-written, or to even be absorbed into the story.
The film’s stylish final showdown in a boxing arena was nicely done. But, it provides a climax to a story without build-up. The middle of the film, where the real expositional meat should be, was dawdling and episodic. The plot was well-drawn but patchy like squares in a comic book. Hanada’s love for Misako resembles a child’s love of a sand bucket – arbitrary, shallow and juvenile. The story-telling core is hollow, suspending any empathy with the main character, and forcing one to fix focus on the nice visuals. Barring the final scene, the set-pieces are nonsensical and a little cheap. The fights are executed with no real craft – it seems they just gave the actors guns and asked them to run around and shoot for a few minutes. You could call the action dated, but the team surely had the smarts to keep these scenes on the same stylistic wavelength as the others.
Branded To Kill is far from a full-bodied gangster flick, it privileges aesthetics over story-telling, when a balance should be struck. Its polish and visual exuberance keeps you under its trance. Like a master clairvoyant’s spell it sucks you into a pool of fine beauty but, over time, reveals itself as pure poppy-cock.
3/5.
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