Finally saw Seijun Suzuki's classic Branded to Kill (1967) a brilliantly abstract gangster film and perhaps the closest Japanese cinema has come to the playful abandon of Godard's early experimental pieces - before he lurched into Maoist didacticism. No. 3 Killer Hanada, played by chipmunk faced Joe Shisido who had surgical implants in his cheaks to increase his star appeal, has returned to town with a wife in tow. Despite his marriage he is soon recruited by the Yakuza and then by a beautiful femme fatale Misako, on a series of missions that will ultimately see him taking on his rivals for the spot of no. 1 Killer. To be honest the story is rather impregnable on first viewing, but the film's visual style and inventive set-pieces make up for any lack of clarity. Suzuki's studio, Nikkatsu, however didn't feel the same way and famously fired the idiosyncratic director on the basis that his films made no sense (Branded to Kill was apparently his last chance to make a 'normal' film, and the chaotic result amounts to the director giving the studio the finger in defiance). In narrative terms the film fluctuates between bizarre set-pieces showing Hanada's escapades as a hitman and various bedroom scenes with his new boss Misako and his wife, who is eventually recruited by his enemies as a spy. I use the term 'bedroom' advisedly, because Hanada and his frisky wife (who wanders around much of the film naked save for a rather contented fox fur) seem to have a penchant for screwing anywhere but the bed. In what must be one of the most brilliant sex scenes ever filmed Suzuki alternates shots of the immaculately crisp white sheets of the bed and shots of the newleyweds fucking on the stairs, on the floor, in the kitchen etc... At one point the camera tracks from the bed and prowls around the house, checking all the likely locations, eventually finding the couple screwing in the rain outside the window. These scenes sum up the ethos of the film, which does anything but what is expected of it. Hanada, for instance, has a rather random fetish for boiled rice and can often be found in a corned, a rice cooker wedged between his thighs, inhaling the smell and muttering 'it doesn't get any better'.
The scenes with the wife are in sharp contrast to those with the morbid and ice-cold Misako, who is always shot in the pouring rain (even if she is indoors), indeed she enters the film driving a convertible with the top down in a storm, picking up Hanada at the road side after an early mission goes awry. Our first insight into her character is the dead starlings that are nailed to her rear view mirror in the place of the more conventional fluffy dice. Her bedroom is a dark, surreal space decorated by thousands of butterflies and entomological specimens, one of which Hanada is destined to become.
This is a film that recalls Godard's famous statement that 'to make a film all you need is a girl and a gun', and not necessarily even a plot. As Hanada makes love to the two women he is never far from a firearm - call it a professional precaution - indeed he often makes use of his pistol as a sexual aid, caressing smooth naked flesh with the metallic barrel in a juxtaposition that hints at the violent nature of his sexuality, or the sexual nature of his violent career, and explores the lack of boundaries between these two parts of his life.
The final sequences, in which Hanada is besieged in his apartment by the seemingly omnipresent Killer no. 1, leads to a hilarious Billy Wilder-esque episode of the pair eating, sleeping and living together at gunpoint. No. 1 is so unwilling to let Hanada out of his sight that he urinates down his own trouser leg and then casually takes off his shoe and empties a cascade of water onto the floor.
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