DVD Watch

Pale Flower

As dark and dreamy as an unexpected wounding by a soft-focus slug, Masahiro Shinoda’s 1964 Nippon noir riffs on Godard’s Breathless and the frenzied, near-psychotic nihilism of postwar Japanese society. Of course, since Pale Flower‘s protagonist is an aging Yakuza who, as the film opens, has just re-entered that society after a three-year sentence, pretty much everything is bad, black, or suddenly strange to us – and him. Ryo Ikebe’s Muraki seems permanently lodged in a past that no longer exists – there’s some notion of honor among thieves that shadows him like a pall throughout the film – and so when he returns to his old Tokyo haunts, the familiarity is at once normal and oddly weird. The crush of modern life, the sheer, blunt brunt of an anxious and overpopulated cityscape, is immediately oppressive: “Why are so many people crammed into cage-like boxes?” Muraki intones in bewildered voiceover. “People are such strange animals.” A creature of habit whether imprisoned within or without, Muraki immediately descends into the Tokyo underworld, a fish-belly black-and-white world of simple, if illicit, desires: lust, gambling, drugs, death. It’s at one of his boss’ floating games of chance, amid the staccato knock of wooden playing cards clattering atop their wooden board, that Muraki encounters the mysterious, ethereal, pale flower of the title: Saeko (the exquisite Mariko Kaga), a bored young coquette with a heart of jade, gorgeous but chilly to the touch. Muraki and Saeko, two poles of a societal and generational spectrum, come together and spark, flaring frozen hearts to life briefly but memorably, like a supernova suddenly extinguished in black-tar bad vibes. The city eats its own and vomits forth beautiful nightmares, and director Shinoda catches it all and makes it look somehow cool. Apart from its Japanese nouvelle vague anti-panache and the bravura performances from both Ikebe and Kaga, Pale Flower‘s most striking aspect is its stunning, altogether unique score by Toro Takemitsu and Yuji Takahashi. Mirroring the rhythmic din of the gambling parlors and the frantic, soul-deadening pace of city life run amok, it’s the aural equivalent of an anxiety attack that just won’t stop. (Notably, the only sequence in the entire film that feels out of place or false takes place in a dream. This is one film where slow-motion seems ridiculous. There’s no time for it.) Pale Flower, with its crisp, perpetual-twilight black-and-white photography (courtesy of Masao Kosugi) is, like a bullet in the throat, utterly breathtaking.

This article appears in June 17 • 2011.