By Chris Hyde

May 28, 2003

Just this past week, the Japanese filmmaker Seijun Suzuki had his 80th birthday. Still an active director today, over the course of his life this innovative filmmaker has created a stylish and influential body of work that stands as a testament to his boundless talent.

Born in Tokyo on May 24, 1923, Suzuki’s early life was colored by a stint in the Army during WWII. Drafted when he was just shortly out of high school, the director survived having his ship sunk by the Americans as it was headed to Taiwan and managed to make his return to Japan when that conflict ended. In the postwar period, he applied for work at Shochiku’s Ofuna studios, a company for which such greats as Shohei Imamura and Nagisa Oshima also worked, and became an assistant director there. After a few years at that studio, he moved on to Nikkatsu studios where he wrote a screenplay under the title Duel at Sunset that was made into a feature film.

Shortly thereafter, the director was awarded helmsmanship of his own feature, and subsequently spent the fifties directing b-movie programmers for the studio. Working at this level gave Suzuki a bit more freedom to experiment with his approach to filmmaking, much akin to the way that the American gangster movie directors operated in the film noir space. While budget was always a limitation, working within constraints forced the director to discover unique ways to convey narrative and let Suzuki’s style flourish within its own small sphere. This is where Suzuki’s innovative artistic sense truly came to the fore; while his films have been dismissed by his critics as incoherent and not at all comprehensible, the surreal nature first born in these poverty row pictures are what help mark the director as a true innovator.

His earlier work in the '50s allowed the filmmaker to truly hit his stride in the early sixties. Between 1961 and 1967, he would make a number of films that would mark his legacy, chief among them Yaju no seishun (Youth of the Beast), Nikutai no mon (Gate of Flesh), Tokyo nagaremono (Tokyo Drifter) and Koroshi no rakuin (Branded to Kill). These latter two films have even finally surfaced in the West, as they were given fine Criterion releases in digital format in recent years. All of these works show the style of a mature Suzuki showing off his maverick style to the best of his ability. Branded to Kill is of especially high quality, a completely bizarre yakuza tale about a hit man with an obsession with the smell of boiled rice who becomes a target himself when a butterfly lands on his gun barrel during a hit and causes him to miss his mark. The film is a riot of gunplay, gun molls and swirling pop colors, and while there’s little of sense in the screenplay the style and vitality of the film carry it to great artistic heights.

Unfortunately for the director, however, his unique artistic vision did not sit well with either his studio or film audiences. The incomprehensibility of the film (and its lack of box office success) cost him his job at the failing Nikkatsu studios, who were to shortly turn over their entire production to the making of sex films. The next few years Suzuki would spend embroiled in a court case and he would then work mostly in television for the next decade, unable to land a feature-directing job until his 1977 return project Hishu monogatari (A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness). Since that time he has made a few more films, directing a new cinema project every few years. He has also been involved in the anime format, lending his hand to the popular Lupin III cartoon series in Japan and continues to work right up to the present day, as the 2001 release of his Pistol Opera openly demonstrates.

This most recent film of Suzuki’s will finally see a North American DVD release sometime in June, and while it has received some mixed press thus far, it should in any case allow audiences here to see just what exactly the older Suzuki is up to. Billed as a sort-of-sequel to Branded to Kill, the film features Japanese actress Makiko Esumi as an assassin gunning for top dog in the world of hits. Echoing the earlier project, she comes up against an array of rivals with colorful names such as Painless Surgeon, The Teacher and Dark Horse in her fight for the top spot. By all accounts the film makes numerous references to its earlier progenitor, and as with its predecessor has a narrative that is far more stylish than plot driven. Once again Suzuki has come under criticism here for the film’s lack of coherent story, though at this point in the man’s career I’m not sure why anyone would expect anything else. As the director pointed out succinctly when speaking of the settings of his films in a recent interview, “in my films, time and place are nonsense." So take that, you carping critics. Can’t you ever just sit back and enjoy the ride?

Fans of Seijun Suzuki have often learned the hard way, however, that critical assessment of the director’s celluloid product has a tendency to be woefully out of tune with its reality. After all, it was just this sort of reaction that helped lead to the director’s decade long hiatus after the first film in this series. Those who are willing to simply accept the maverick’s surreal style are more likely to find themselves happily along for the ride in an action-filled pop candy colored treat. The filmmaker’s lengthy career and the cinematic heights that it has scaled thus far demonstrate clearly that Suzuki is a director with a unique personal vision that transcends the simpler straight story fixations that might trouble a lesser talent. In any case, the immense vision of Seijun Suzuki and his devotion to finding his own personal style have allowed the filmmaker to continue to create cinematic works of flair and vitality even as he now passes the cusp of eight decades on the planet. While film direction remains for the most part a young person’s game, the example set here shows that even an old maverick can continue to create works that still display zest and artistic vision. So here’s hoping that this great director still has a trick or two up his sleeve, for it’s far to early to have seen the last film that Seijun Suzuki will ever make.

View other columns by Chris Hyde