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Branded to Kill (Seijun Suzuki, 1967)
Goro Hanada, the number 3 rated hitman in the Japanese underworld, accepts an impossible job from a beautiful woman (because he's fallen in love with her), but a butterfly lands on his gun and causes him to completely botch it. He then finds himself on the run from the other highly rated hitman in the area.
This movie is completely insane. Like bat**** crazy incomprehensible insane. Like if crack cocaine was a person and Mr. Crack Cocaine made a movie, I think this is what Crack Cocaine would make. And you know what? Mr. Crack Cocaine would make a pretty ****ing awesome movie. Mr. Crack Cocaine is actually Seijun Suzuki, and without him, this movie would have been just another b-movie, but what he created instead was a stylish, genre-bending, sexploitative, satirical, and absurd work of art.
Take Goro Hanada. He's the number 3 hitman in all of Japan, and we are definitely shown evidence of this during the first job he takes escorting an important man across the city. When things go awry he immediately takes control of the situation and handles the threats with skillful precision. Now this is all very cool and gritty, bad ass even, but what about rice? Have you ever even smelled boiling rice? Have you ever required the sweet aroma of rice boiling to get sufficiently turned on for a night of beastial sex? No? Weird. Goro Hanada loves the smell of boiling rice, it's just what gets his groove on, and while watching this I quickly decided to assume that that has to be why his cheeks are so puffy. He just likes to keep a little extra in there to snack on throughout the day. Hanada is the perfect mixture of cool and ridiculous. He's equal parts effortless hitman and satirical clown, and the perfect protagonist in a plot so imbedded in the absurd.
I called this movie incomprehensible but that was a bit of hyperbole, it's nearly incomprehensible. There's a lot of interesting stuff bouncing around and it actually can be pretty fun to try to piece it all together. Like the two woman featured in the film. You have Hanada's over-the-top wild wife, who is nearly always either attempting to have sex with him (boil the rice), or have sex with another deadly Yakuza (gotta keep her options open), but then Hanada doesn't really love her, so who cares? Then you have Misako, the nihilistic unemotional mistress that Hanada is in love with, but she is obsessed with death and will refuse all advances unless he kills her. She also has an home that is full of dead butterflies, which also happens to be the insect that caused all of Hanada's misfortune, coincidence? It's just all another surreal layer in this absurd stack of pancakes of a movie and plenty fun to ponder the significance of. You truly never know where this film is going to take you, which makes it easy to see how filmmakers like Tarantino, Jarmusch, and probably Guy Ritchie (at least his early work) were heavily influenced by it.
I would be lying though if I didn't admit that the movie could stand to be a little less incoherent. There were plenty of times throughout the film that I really had to strain to figure out what exactly was going on, and while this is part of the film's charm, at times it took me out of the movie in a way that was less playful and more aggravating. The most important thing about this film, to me, though is how ******* fun it is to watch. It just flew by. And even though It might not make a whole lot of sense, hell it might even try it's hardest to make the least amount of sense that it can, it's over-the-top action, abundance of style, and absurd sense of humor really make it a film that is absolutely worth watching.
Goro Hanada, the number 3 rated hitman in the Japanese underworld, accepts an impossible job from a beautiful woman (because he's fallen in love with her), but a butterfly lands on his gun and causes him to completely botch it. He then finds himself on the run from the other highly rated hitman in the area.
This movie is completely insane. Like bat**** crazy incomprehensible insane. Like if crack cocaine was a person and Mr. Crack Cocaine made a movie, I think this is what Crack Cocaine would make. And you know what? Mr. Crack Cocaine would make a pretty ****ing awesome movie. Mr. Crack Cocaine is actually Seijun Suzuki, and without him, this movie would have been just another b-movie, but what he created instead was a stylish, genre-bending, sexploitative, satirical, and absurd work of art.
Take Goro Hanada. He's the number 3 hitman in all of Japan, and we are definitely shown evidence of this during the first job he takes escorting an important man across the city. When things go awry he immediately takes control of the situation and handles the threats with skillful precision. Now this is all very cool and gritty, bad ass even, but what about rice? Have you ever even smelled boiling rice? Have you ever required the sweet aroma of rice boiling to get sufficiently turned on for a night of beastial sex? No? Weird. Goro Hanada loves the smell of boiling rice, it's just what gets his groove on, and while watching this I quickly decided to assume that that has to be why his cheeks are so puffy. He just likes to keep a little extra in there to snack on throughout the day. Hanada is the perfect mixture of cool and ridiculous. He's equal parts effortless hitman and satirical clown, and the perfect protagonist in a plot so imbedded in the absurd.
I called this movie incomprehensible but that was a bit of hyperbole, it's nearly incomprehensible. There's a lot of interesting stuff bouncing around and it actually can be pretty fun to try to piece it all together. Like the two woman featured in the film. You have Hanada's over-the-top wild wife, who is nearly always either attempting to have sex with him (boil the rice), or have sex with another deadly Yakuza (gotta keep her options open), but then Hanada doesn't really love her, so who cares? Then you have Misako, the nihilistic unemotional mistress that Hanada is in love with, but she is obsessed with death and will refuse all advances unless he kills her. She also has an home that is full of dead butterflies, which also happens to be the insect that caused all of Hanada's misfortune, coincidence? It's just all another surreal layer in this absurd stack of pancakes of a movie and plenty fun to ponder the significance of. You truly never know where this film is going to take you, which makes it easy to see how filmmakers like Tarantino, Jarmusch, and probably Guy Ritchie (at least his early work) were heavily influenced by it.
I would be lying though if I didn't admit that the movie could stand to be a little less incoherent. There were plenty of times throughout the film that I really had to strain to figure out what exactly was going on, and while this is part of the film's charm, at times it took me out of the movie in a way that was less playful and more aggravating. The most important thing about this film, to me, though is how ******* fun it is to watch. It just flew by. And even though It might not make a whole lot of sense, hell it might even try it's hardest to make the least amount of sense that it can, it's over-the-top action, abundance of style, and absurd sense of humor really make it a film that is absolutely worth watching.