Climbing Mt. Suzuki
Section Three

Suzuki’s sardonic appreciation of misguided human endeavors looks not simply at how the strong exploit the weak, but also how twisted hungers bring us to seek out our own self-destruction. It’s not so much that the world is a prison, but that each of us is a prisoner of our own desires and ambitions. The hit man, for example, lives a life of constant anxiety, watching his back while moving forward, trapped in a dance of defense and offense.  

Sex is not freedom in Suzuki’s films. Whether for gangster or cadet, ingenue or matron, the blind play of lust makes everyone vulnerable and child’s play to manipulate. What’s more, it’s a reciprocal exchange as women seek their own exploitation, whether from obsessive torment or financial necessity (“No sex without money!” is the code of Gate of Flesh’s heroines), while men are emasculated by the social system without being aware of it. When the erotic drive, dramatized remorselessly by Suzuki as more feverish than pleasurable, breaks through conventions, it erupts in expressionist spasms of sadistic action that punctuate the cycle of pursuit and frustration.

However debased or sleazy his characters, at least this vision is delivered without the moralistic finger-wagging of Hollywood convention and is couched in such luxuriant visual invention and playful humor that even the most despairing works seem rich with the satisfactions of art. The impression is that Suzuki cannot help but laugh at our self-dramatizing and blind groping to satisfy our instinctual drives: it’s all performance, it’s all so much reciting of Humpty-Dumpty The unrealistic, highly stylized colors, the hyper aesthetic depiction of life, the experimentation with different cinematic styles, all these are the theater of existence, culminating in the radical theatricality of Pistol Opera.

The air is thin and rarefied at the pinnacle of Pistol Opera, but this film unites all the director’s themes in his purest statement. Purportedly starting out to remake Branded to Kill, Suzuki ultimately reproduces only the earlier film’s basic situation— the agony of the assassin—but reverses its particularities: black-and-white blooms to lurid color, ‘Scope reverts to academic 1.33:1 format,  and  the hit man transforms to a hit woman.

Previously seen as the stricken widow in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Maborosi (1995), Makiko Esumi here swaggers like a samurai as the lithe-bodied operative code-named “Stray Cat”. Like her prototype, Jo Shishido in Branded To Kill, she is obsessed with changing her ranking from Killer No.3 to Killer No. 1 (“Useless Man” and “Hundred Eyes” stand in the way), yet she remains blind to the paradox of her own behavior. If she achieves her goal of being number one, she will be in much greater danger of attack from ambitious pretenders to the top spot.

Suzuki provides not the slightest moral questioning of the heroine’s profession of killer. She is enthralled by her ambition and ritualistic codes, and pop morality has shriveled questions of right and wrong to separating cool from uncool. Rejecting any pretense to conventional moral responsibility, Pistol Opera’s bitter and despairing vision also remains free of Hollywood’s insistent moralizing. Above all, Suzuki persisted as a fierce champion of individualism in one of the planet’s most consensual societies, leveling a jaundiced countercultural eye at all.

Less a sister of the sex workers in Gate of Flesh and Story of a Prostitute, more an aggressive figure to prove that females can be just as tough and doomed as males, she cuts a fashionable figure in kimono and boots, yet she does not accumulate a physical reality. Suzuki carefully allots her some moments of vulnerability, resting her back against her grandmother, but she more typically dominates the surrounding décor, like Lucille Ball cracking the whip over her carousel ponies in Minnelli’s Ziegfeld Follies. Assassination has become theater: the elaborate codes and signs of hit man mythology serve as ballast for the extravagant visuals, a frame that Suzuki clothes with colorful tableaux and action sequences.

She meets her match in an allusive combat of wits with a preening and bemused lesbian figure. Swathed in white, but wearing an inexplicable purple veil (that she whips off not once but twice, revealing her face to the audience but not the heroine), she alternately teases and confronts Stray Cat. Elvis Mitchell comments: “Imagine if Howard Hawks had remade Rio Bravo—well, he did, actually, but imagine if he had done it with a female cast and stirred in a slowed, sexual tension between the characters. That is what happens in Pistol Opera.” (13) Their scenes play with heavy-breathing erotic innuendo, yet with so little narrative weight that it’s like a conflict of paper dolls.

For once, men are treated with a new tenderness, perhaps because their bodies have betrayed them. A veteran hit man now hobbles on a crutch, forced into retirement when his once powerful body no longer responds. Another operates from a wheelchair, and a third killer can hardly control his asthma (his angelic blond appearance recalls a similar character in Joss Whedon’s enduringly popular TV series. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”).

Toying with trompe-l’oeil, Suzuki plays games of perception by devising disorienting shifts in scale, as in a magnificent face-off scene where all the massive weight of Mt. Fuji dominates the frame. Pistol Opera equally ignores physical laws, as the dead are apt to pay a visit from their golden afterlife (in a retrospective bow to the ghostly dimension of Zigeunerweisen).

Mike D’Angelo wrote about Pistol Opera : “Organized around rhythmic rather than narrative principles, it isn’t so much operatic as jazzy, performing virtuosic staccato riffs that transform the familiar into something vibrant and strange.” (14)

Even stranger is the peeling away of connecting tissue in the screenplay of Kazunori Ito, screenwriter of Mamoru Oshii’s anime thriller, Ghost In the Shell (Kokaku Kidotai, 1995). By contrast, Brian De Palma’s Femme Fatale, despite its tricky multi-layered plot and flashy visual complexities, still managed to convince as a heist narrative, however farfetched. When absolutely anything can happen, as in the anarchic Pistol Opera, then nothing carries much weight or narrative urgency, unpredictability itself becomes predictable, and storytelling gets devalued for the casual viewer.

When conflict explodes in violent expressionist colors, it includes a vibrant mustard yellow that previously lived only in Vincente Minnelli musicals. Red laser beams penetrate the sulfurous smoke in a bamboo forest pastoral, and at one point Stray Cat’s grandmother recites the colors of a sunset (or was that a goldfish, or a swarm of insects?). Even the heroine’s luger turns a lively shade of rose, no doubt blushing from embarrassment at being a prosaic black color.

After a rifle draws blood, the familiar red spreads in a swimming pool, yet the lurid colors in Suzuki’s paint-box seem shallow, lacking a tactile quality. Instead of the voluptuous light of Michael Powell’s Black Narcissus or Kurosawa’s Dod’es-ka-den that sculpts the figures, Pistol Opera suggests the flat comic strip color of ink bleeding into newsprint, the 21st century color of manga.

Throughout, Suzuki seems to smile ruefully at the splendors and miseries of the human condition, pulling aside the narrative to blow pastel smoke into our brains. It is remarkable that he rarely repeats a visual image (at least so it seems from viewing the ten movies here, which represent not even twenty percent of his feature work). A more authoritative appraisal must await the re-release of Zigeunerweisen and the other two titles in his historical trilogy, The Fang In the Hole (Ana no Kiba, 1979) and Kageroza Heat Shimmer Theater (1981).

Suzuki’s fractured narratives full of sudden reversals express a world of instability and distrust: keep one eye on the target but watch your back too. If beauty arises out of the violence and haphazard order of the world, that is our consolation. However, despite many cryptic aphorisms (“Hundred Eyes brings a smile to the dead”), despite Suzuki’s obsessive concentration on a culture of death, Pistol Opera is too playful to produce rank despair. Ultimately, it’s a question of philosophy whether one labels his vision as nihilistic, or nakedly cynical, or bracingly liberated from illusions about romantic love, macho heroics, and spiritual salvation.

In the noble range of Japanese cinema, Mt. Suzuki may not be the highest peak, but this is a crag of unmistakable power and individuality, characterized by unique paradoxes: the works are earthy yet aestheticized, egalitarian yet obsessed with hierarchy, practical yet abstract. Viewed through Suzuki’s kaleidoscope, the world fragments into so many absurdist images, flourishing in acid-bright colors. In fact, the unity of his work lies most in these condensed visuals: like Paradjanov’s, Suzuki’s images themselves become a positive statement because they keep cinema alive by affirming the power of the artist.

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Climbing Mt. Suzuki Footnotes.

Climbing Mt. Suzuki
Section One
Section Two
Section Three