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Directed by: Suzuki Seijun Starring: Yumiko Nogawa, Jo Shishido This may be Suzuki's best film, and from someone like me who loves his films and has devoted a lot of time to studying his work, that can be taken as the highest of praise. This is the first of his loosely related "Flesh Trilogy", all of which star Yumiko Nogawa as a prostitute (the others being Story of a Prostitute and Carmen from Kawachi). It's also considered the lead-in to the pinku eiga films that became popular in the late sixties and seventies, and it was the first mainstream Japanese film to feature nudity. The film is set immediately after World War Two, with Tokyo still lying in ruins from the fire-bombings and American military forces occupying the country. Suzuki uses a small band of prostitutes to construct a national allegory, comparing the sexual subjugation of the characters to the political and economic subjugation of the country in not-so subtle terms. This can safely be called an anti-American film, so if you find yourself saing "go back to France" a lot, you should probably skip it. One scene finds a character slaughtering a cow, to which the others reflect "Meat sells at the market for 40 yen a pound. Do we?" It's the same kind of commodity fetishism used by Vertov and Eisenstien, but it's use as a metaphor for the "meat market" is even more powerful. The use of colors throughout the film is dazzling. Each of the prostitutes is associated with a different color; one with green, another with red, one with yellow and the last with purple. These may or may not have any symbolic meaning, but they give the film a strong visual presence. Suzuki's use of extreme close-ups also gives the film an interesting visual quality, capturing the anguish of the characters and inviting the audience to either be repulsed or to indulge in a little sadomashocistic spectatorship. Fans of Suzuki's other films won't find the kind of "free jazz" action that his yakuza films pftem feature, but it's fascinating to see what he is capable of as a filmmaker outside of the genre. If you're a fan of the Female Convict Scorpion series, you will probably appreciate this as well. RATING: 5.0 PROS: incredibly beautiful, interesting political subtext, beautiful women CONS: brutal at times, maybe too political for some ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058409/
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Feb 12, 2005 04:27
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| # ? May 7, 2024 14:22 |
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