Seijun Suzuki’s oddball artistic style is an acquired taste, as the director mischievously admits that in his films, time and space are nonsense. Filmed in Ether describes it for Suzuki-novices: “Take Quentin Tarantino’s pop-art stylings, Baz Luhrmann’s unhinged bravado, Nicolas Winding Refn’s neon fever dreams, and Wong Kar-wai’s liberal use of time and space, and throw all those elements onto a single canvas.” Those and many more directors (John Woo, Takeshi Kitano, Jim Jarmusch, and Damien Chazelle, to name a few) have admitted to being avid fans. Tarantino, for instance, borrowed from the ingenious Japanese director quite liberally for Kill Bill.
While Seijun Suzuki enjoyed worldwide recognition, amassing quite the cult following, in his home country, his features remained largely unnoticed and misunderstood at the time of their release. The rebellious director was even expelled from the mainstream Japanese filmmaking industry — ten years later, he came back with a vengeance, reentering the stage victoriously as an independent auteur.
Despite this struggle for artistic freedom, major studios’ antagonism, and general indifference from the Japanese public, nowadays, Seijun Suzuki is etched in the public imagination as a quintessential Japanese creator (partly because of the beautiful restorations of his movies from the Criterion Collection). Film critic Manohla Dargis firmly states: “To experience a film by Japanese B-movie visionary Seijun Suzuki is to experience Japanese cinema in all its frenzied, voluptuous excess.” These are Suzuki’s best movies.
5 Story of a Prostitute
Nikkatsu
Reflecting on his wartime experiences, Suzuki explains that he couldn’t help but laugh — and this is how the trademark marriage of graphic violence and goofiness came to be. He made movies about war specifically, too, choosing an unexpected angle in Story of a Prostitute (that’s definitely on-brand for him): a female empowerment romance following a fierce, strong-willed girl who becomes a comfort woman in Manchuria during the Sino-Japanese war.
Prostitution for her is a deliberate act of revenge, and she proves to be a tenacious, sturdy individual, becoming an important figure in the camps, following her own code of values, not unlike samurai, yakuza, or army men. Suzuki ditches historical accuracy: women, especially comfort women, did not have any voice at those times — to create a strange power fantasy very ahead of its time; that perhaps still is. Story of a Prostitute sets a precedent perhaps for elevated revisionist exploitation movies, something that will be cultivated by later directors, namely Tarantino.
4 Youth of the Beast
One of the greatest yakuza movies, the whimsical Youth of the Beast is famously considered to be the turning point of Suzuki’s career. After eight years of creating generic movies for the studio machine, Suzuki, fed up with the formula, lets his artistic imagination run free, and his baroque, fever-dream style superseded the studio structured vision. Thus, his feud with Nikkatsu, the major studio in Japan at that point, began. Suzuki jazzed up the low-brow low-budget genre with pop-art elegance and avant-garde theatricality, trailblazing the Japanese New Wave movement that challenged old masters, like Kenji Mizoguchi or Yasujiro Ozu. Youth of the Beast defined itself against the conventions of classic aesthetics and plots.
Suzuki gallivanted with the dizzying meta-narratives, interrupting a formulaic yakuza movie with a scene where it turns out that thugs have been watching all that was happening through the mirror. It was his critique and his disparagement of the genre, and it became a symbol of resistance during the Japanese student protests of the late 1960s.
3 Zigeunerweisen
Cinema Placet
Three years after his rather mediocre attempt of a comeback in A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness, Suzuki emerges with Zigeunerweisen, a supernatural melodrama set in 1920s Japan, and a dramatic first installment of the art house Taisho trilogy, which also included Heat-Haze Theatre and Yumeji. Adapted from Hyakken Uchida’s novel Disk of Sarasate, this film turned out to be a hauntingly beautiful auteur masterpiece that existed independently of Nikkatsu.
The film sort of follows two friends who are united by Pablo de Sarasate’s song Gypsy Airs and an obsession with an enigmatic geisha. Accompanied by de Sarasate’s melancholic violin score, Zigeunerweisen is atypically slow and dialogue-heavy for Suzuki, not a rebellion anymore but a personal artistic exploration. This movie proceeded to become a critical and commercial success, remarked by Kinema Junpo magazine as the best film of the year, and even won the Japanese Academy Award for Best Picture
2 Branded to Kill
The reverse-James Bond culmination of Suzuki’s restlessness and his growing lean towards boldness, complete trope subversion, and absurdist humor, resulted in the underrated (at that time) gem Branded to Kill. Later, this surrealist self-styled universe served as a major inspiration to Jim Jarmusch’s great film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai and Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol.2. At the time, it was the last straw for Nikkatsu, who dismissed Suzuki’s films as “incomprehensible.”
Already in the doghouse, Suzuki had to make the movie on a limited budget, which meant, among everything else, a black-and-white picture. He decided to make a movie about Hanada, who is the No. 3 hitman in Japan. This placement suits him just fine. He has a lot of money, a luxurious apartment, a beautiful wife, and a passion for the smell of freshly cooked rice.
Branded to Kill doesn’t resemble a coherent story at all, but rather a convoluted combination of expressionistic snippets, each connected to the personal life of the main character. All these vignettes progressively lead to chaos, where fantasy and reality mix in a surreal movie which thrives on incongruity. Female nudity is surprisingly ambiguous. The sex scenes are naturalistic but devoid of passion. The murders are comical.
1 Tokyo Drifter
Suzuki said that the utter boredom of making cookie-cutter movies drew him up the wall and compelled him to experiment. His frustration with the genre claustrophobia arguably peaked in Tokyo Drifter, a gonzo yakuza musical that led to his commercial peril. A surrealist spaghetti western film done Japanese parody full of cartoonish violence and go-go music follows a man who wants to leave yakuza life behind, whistling the theme song and jumping into musical numbers unexpectedly.
Tokyo Drifter is a pop art masterpiece, a cultural mirror of the shift from traditional high-values yakuza movies to gritty, naturalistic ones about corporate greed, poverty, and disenchantment. A perfect illustration of the shift just might be a sardonic Singin’ In The Rain performed in a Wild West saloon rendition. It is hysterically funny, and visually — a work of pure art.
Perfect for such a premise, Suzuki’s combination of gritty realism and psychedelic inanity creates a stunning visual experience that draws its inspirations from traditional kabuki theater. The use of a widescreen anamorphic lens that required an adapter to watch in ordinary cinemas is an homage to the hanamichi, the long and narrow kabuki stage, used as a walkway to the main stage but also where the important scenes were performed. The intense colors, artificial lighting, and exaggerated acting are all part of the audacious theatricality, common in Suzuki’s films.
Nicolas Winding Refn claimed it to be one of his favorite films; Tarantino cited it as his major reference for Kill Bill Vol.1; Damien Chazelle once said during a press conference in Tokyo that it was the inspiration behind La La Land: “Suzuki’s work is like musicals for me, but only with pistols.” Tokyo Drifter is a cultural pièce de résistance, referenced incessantly in cinema to this day, making Suzuki’s lunatic, anarchistic, and revolutionary work immortalized in pop culture.
