Shinjuku Triad Society

新宿黒社会 チャイナ マフィア戦争 

Shinjuku kuroshakai: Chaina mafia sensô

Takashi Miike, 1995, Japan

Writer: Ichirô Fujita

 

“Actually, I am a lazy person,” says Takashi Miike, the man whose video, cinematic and TV output is legendarily prolific. Certainly not when it comes to filmmaking. Between 1991 and 1995, IMB lists that he had already made twelve straight-to-video and TV films before this, his first theatrical release, so perhaps it is no surprise that  ‘Shinjuku Triad Society’ comes as a practically fully formed Miike, full of the touches that would define his cinema. The melting pot vibe that runs through Miike’s films seems to erupt from the basis that it’s all been done before, that we know all the tropes and so let’s go mixing things up a little.

The opening to ‘Shinjuku Triad Society’ is not quite as fevered as ‘Dead or Alive’, but it works up a similar appetite of expectation with its cuts between several incidents and letting the audience find its own way in by recognising the tropes it is working with. A nude man on a bed, a hustler, a throat slashing, an invasive strip search, all before the credits. And, like ‘Dead or Alive’, ‘Shinjuku Triad Society’ then settles into that oddball melancholy that characterises Miike’s work.  It is this trait that has come to strike me most upon second viewings of his films. Like many in the West, it was ‘Audition’ and ‘Ichi the Killer’ that introduced me to Miike, then ‘Visitor Q’, so it was truly only when I saw ‘Rainy Dog’ that I sensibly saw past just the shock value and was fully aware of how focused on the downbeat he was. It’s an unhappy chaos. The first time, you just have to go with the ride as with scene-to-scene there are tonal shifts and quirks that keep you a little disorientated.

This carefully controlled balancing act of provocation and an underworld characterised by resignation and doom is what keeps a constant draw of fascination. Typically, ‘Shinjuku Triad Society’ is peppered with the violent, the outrageous, the despondent and the grim. But Miike offers the offensive and the empathetic in equal measure so buy the time we get to the rape-by-salaryman, we are already in a heady confusion of the bleak and the transgressive. This is the first of Miike’s ‘Black Society’ trilogy, followed by ‘Rainy Dog’ and ‘Ley Lines’ which all focus on social rejects as antiheroes. There’s no one really to root for as you have the Triad on the one side, battling over turf and business, and on the other there’s our protagonist Detective Kiriya (Kippei Shina), who is guilty of brutality and rape and only gets to do what a cop has to do by – and isn’t this always the way? – going untamed and off the grid. Established as abhorrent, Kiriya then embarks upon a principled quest to save his brother from falling in with an unstable gang leader, which follows a trail of gang war and organ trafficking.

Miike and writer Ichirô Fujita offer as much a portrayal of the underclass of crime as ‘City of God’ or ‘Gommorah’, but this is not so obviously neo-realistic because the tone is so offbeat. Each scene has a little idiosyncrasy that seems offhand, even goofy, but informs and speaks to a wider context. Like a gang leader defiantly exposing himself to his rivals as an act that is simultaneously eccentric, excessive, and confronting the machismo that defines the Triad world. But it should be noted that this is a gangland drama very much defined by homosexuality, and this alone criticises that macho realm/genre. Michael Mann this isn’t, and the angst here is more freaky than whiny.

And yet Miike has weird sympathy for the grotesques and warped ones of this most depraved context. One detail that stands out across this ‘Black Triad’ series is that the protagonists exist between Japanese and Chinese cultures, being mixed-race or/and displaced, but at home in neither and vulnerable to prejudice. It’s a theme that runs throughout his work. There’s slim room for morals or betterment – although it does depend on which Miike you are watching. It’s the sad and outrageous world for outsiders. 

Dead or Alive - the Takashi Miike trilogy

DEAD OR ALIVE

Takshi Miike, 1999, Japan

Writer: Ichiro Ryo

The first 10 minutes of Miike’s ‘Dead or Alive’ are so breathless with sex, shock, violence, music, colour, parody and back-story that you are likely to feel your jaw widening. The film is counted in by the protagonists… “1, 2, 3 -” … and then we’re off with a kaleidoscope of falling corpses, Kôji Endô’s industrial rock track, frenzied editing cutting across a number of stories and characters, food gorging, outrageous coke-sniffing, strip joints, breasts and gyrations, shotguns, supermarkets, gay toilet sex and assassinations, machine guns… and so on. It seems that when Miike was handed a typical gangster script, he just condensed it down to this giddy opening. As far as kinetic introductions go, it’s a virtuoso piece. It encapsulates how inventive Miike can be at a dizzying speed, how shocking he is (you won’t wonder where accusations of misogyny come from but the bathroom killing won’t win many fans from the gay community either: Miike’s shocks embrace everyone). And that’s even before the opening finishes with a bloodbath, which perhaps neatly provides a keen metaphor for one of Miike’s approaches: take a bunch of people… characters or the audience, maybe... and throw a grenade amongst them. As well as machine gun fire. Unpredictable, unfettered, quite brilliant. Miike is simultaneously gung-ho and perfectly in control. As Chuck Bowen says: 

“In the Dead or Alive trilogy and many other films, Miike demolishes singularity of tone, implicitly suggesting such values to be bourgeoisie luxuries appeasing conditioned expectations and responses.” 

Hold your breath.

And then the bigger shock is that ‘Dead or Alive’ is then not that high octane thriller that perhaps the introduction implies: instead, it is more of a character study of two men on the opposite sides of the law and their ties to family and macho obsessions. V-cinema superstars Riki Takeuchi and Shô Aikawa are the through-line of the ‘Dead or Alive’ films, although they do not play the same characters: this is equally a showbiz conceit and implies themes of reincarnation. Perhaps inevitably, it’s the Miike shock-factor that comes up front but his films are also typified by melancholia. They may be mad and bad but they are also equally downbeat and haunting. It’s his nimble way with genre and his simultaneous disregard and understanding of them that makes Miike’s nonsense more credible than a lot of Eastern madcap romps. It’s a deep-rooted restlessness that always makes him interesting and this attention can be remarkable when it focuses: it’s then we get the likes of ‘Audition’, ‘Rainy Dog’ and ’13 Warriors’. His agenda that anything can be used makes sentimentality just another colour – before the car explodes. So when the kinetic opening of ‘Dead or Alive’ gives way to character studies of two gangster genre archetypes – the macho steely gangster who is so  full of machismo he is barely able to talk and is quite unable to sit with his legs closed (Riki Takeuchi); the dogged policeman obsessed with his work at the expense of his family (Aikawa Shô) – it really shouldn’t be a surprise.  This also acts as a satire of crime genre machismo, but it’s a while before that becomes clear.

Meanwhile, we have the tale of a small group of yakuza hoodlums run by Ryuichi (Riki) taking on the Japanese and Chinese mafias. Ryuichi’s younger brother returns from studies but is mortified to find his education was funded with blood money. Detective Jojima (Shô) is determined to stop them even as domestic demands for cash for his ill daughter’s treatment lead him to corruption and his boss seems to be saying don’t work too hard. Against these family concerns, events veer wildly from the appalling to the blackly comic to the tragic and maudlin, often within the same scene. For example, the scene where the girl of the gang is murdered by enema, laying in a pool of her own faeces whilst the underworld boss soliloquises about his lot (a small penis) is weirdly full of as much pathos as disgust and produces a response beyond mere horror.

So when we get to the final showdown, it really isn’t so much of a surprise when these guys turn into cartoon characters that can produce rocket launchers and superhero-like balls of power from thin air. That their fight devastates the world is where the film can be seen to parody the genre: two big stars get together and – pow! Or this is simply a dig at those denouements when the good guy and the bad guy faceoff  and it all gets increasingly ridiculous. Miike didn’t want to kill one of the main stars so this was his solution. It’s certainly a baffling lurch from the subtleties of the story up to then, but still further evidence of Miike’s “fuck it” style. It’s certainly memorable.

DEAD OR ALIVE 2: BIRDS

DEAD OR ALIVE 2: TÔBÔSHA

Takashi Miike, 2000, Japan

Writer: Masa Nakamura

‘Dead or Alive 2: Birds’ may not have the jaw-dropping intro of its predecessor, but the opening is no slouch at all. A boy stands in a room (?); a title card says “Where are you?” and we cut to a vision of the planets (whoa? – picking up where the first left off?); and then a man – whose penchant for magic provides many minor highlights – tells a story of warring underworld gangs using cigarette packets, setting off a hit that doesn’t quite go according to plan. The killer with the bleached blond hair – who we recognise as Aikawa Shô from the first film – sees another hit-man doing the job and he recognises him as an old childhood friend – Takeuchi Riki from the first film. Nevertheless, Shô collects the pay anyway. These first ten minutes knock out an inventive exposition, a hook, offbeat comedy and existential angst without barely breaking into a sweat. It occurs to me that the cigarette packet moment, in an American gangster film (say, by Scorsese or Tarantino), would be one to be elevated into the pop culture pantheon of endlessly mimicked and quoted film scenes. But for Miike, it’s just another inventive offbeat moment. These moments are usually all over the place in a Miike film.

Then the film strides into a sequence where the film acts like a trailer of itself.

There is no actual connection to the first ‘Dead or Alive’ except for the underworld setting, but whereas the first used the “opposite-sides-of-the-law-but-really-the-same” narrative, ‘Birds’ is grounded in the “childhood friends” theme that the gangster genre subsists on. Miike is taking us to one of the essences of the gangster genre, namely framing gangster friendships in a sentimental and nostalgic light (which has never been done better than Sergio Leone’s ‘Once Upon A Time in America’). This allows the characters to shed as many tears as bullets as they are murdering friends and cohorts or watching everyone they’ve grown up with die. Miike throws in flashbacks in faintly baffling spurts to colour in the history and to provide jigsaw pieces of information for the audience to piece together. It is here that Miike surprises again by showing this most outrageous and fickle of directors can also serve up focused sentiment. At its most touching: a gorgeous-looking and amusing vignette of the boys on the beach; and then a moving sequence where as adults they are reunited and recreate the fooling around of their orphanage days. But there is also an eerie flashback when one boy returns home one day to find his foster father dying, covered in blood; a moment that distorts both visually and auditory in a fleeting scene that would match anything spooky by David Lynch.

Miike tears through tonal shifts and genre motifs without either pausing for breath or losing his grip. It is obvious that Miike is a master of genre-mash-ups. Soon, he is cutting between a slightly obscene play for children and nasty gangland massacre. Our two hit-men are going to perform in the play with a theatre group (who have lost a couple of members in an auto-accident, a scene punctuated with cartoon crash sounds) but they have a shady reputation of misbehaving at plays when they were kids, so the theatre owner is panicking when the hall fills up, and then: “Oh, Hello Mr. Mayor!” It’s all very much provincial comedy. Meanwhile, gangsters are blasted whilst having sex during a gangland slaughter, etc. Further meanwhile: the school play about loneliness and advocating togetherness includes inappropriate penis gags. Miike alternates between farce and bloodshed, reinforcing the question of what lays between children and the killers they become.

The film veers again: our hit-men, moved by their return to innocence or at least childishness and imagination, decide to use their skills as assassins to rid the world of bad guys and use the money to pay for vaccines for Third World Children: this is apparently what Shô has been doing all along and Rikki joins him happily. Our assassins kill for the starving even as they gorge themselves on noodles (food and bonding is a frequent motif). Miike has no qualms about utilising real footage of Third World children for his gangster fantasia: indeed, Miike can and will use anything, appropriate or not. The film’s harshest criticism of crime seemingly is that it deprives needy children. This leads the assassins to also become literal avenging angels when they sprout wings.

But finally a lifestyle shall catch up, vengeance breeds vengeance and these assassin-heroes get shot down (and we see their murderers as the children they once were too), yet that is not the end, for there’s genre satire to be had. They drag themselves soaked in blood, for at least a day, back to the ferry and their childhood home – stopping to help tourists take photos - as if insisting that they stumble relentlessly to the most sentimental ending they possibly can. This is surely just as unfeasible as the other ‘DOA’ endings with plausibility being determinedly elastic. But it seems more appropriate to see this not only as genre parody but also the last fantasy of dying hit-men – perhaps just like the finale of the film’s predecessor, it shouldn’t quite be trusted.

In the end, Miike leaves us with one final vision, full of tenderness, anger and possibility: the tiny fists of babies. That this is a symbol of hope rather than mawkishness shows again that Miike’s anything-goes aesthetic has a sharp focus and that perhaps the biggest surprise for his audience is his capacity for humanity as well as shock and horror.

DEAD OR ALIVE: FINAL

Takashi Miike,  2002,  Japan

Writers: Hitoshi Ishikawa, Yoshinobu Kamo, Ichiro Ryu

	Again, working only to his own agenda, Miike completes his ‘Dead or Alive’ trilogy with a science-fiction thriller. We are introduced to this future world – which looks very much like a low-budget dystopia – with a scene of a dirigible passing over the streets with the film’s title to Kôji Endô’s faux-Vangelis music. ‘Final’ is indeed partly a ‘Blade Runner’ pastiche: for example, a running gag is that there’s a guy that runs around continuously playing saxophone solos. Our lead hero Ryô (Shô Aikawa) is indeed a “replicant” (so the subtitles say), an affable android drifter who, when attacked or protecting street kids and with the help of a little 'Matrix'-style bullet-time, becomes a deadly killing machine. He ends up joining a small gang of rebels who refuse to take Dictator Wu’s birth control pills and reserve the right to have babies. Dictator Wu (Richard Chen) has more-or-less outlawed heterosexual procreation – his philosophy seeming to be that too many people means that war and devastation is inevitable and that homosexuality is the cure – and seems to rule a shabby post-apocalyptic society like some guerrilla leader in a run-down nation. There is really no extravagance or dazzling set design here. Indeed, it is all filmed with a slightly jaundiced and sickly-looked filter. Meanwhile, 0fficer Honda (Aikawa Shô) hunts the rebels and replicants for the Mayor…

It might be expected that Miike’s science-fiction would have all the razzle-dazzle of the previous ‘DOA’ films, but this is the most aesthetically restrained entry, looking like  a no-budget straight-to-video cash-in with a couple of intriguing diversions that, really, don’t go so far and where the characters just seem to come a full stop. And then any internal logic is jettisoned for the typically outrageous finale. 

'Final’ has its one truly eerie moment when, having tried to commit suicide, Honda’s wife lays half-dead on the bed sparking electricity.

The fight scenes are executed with flare, using wire-work and a brush of digital effects but these are used with restraint.  Mostly, the story mopes around Ryô and the rebels whilst they attempt an attack on Wu and then find their numbers dwindling down to nothing due to incompetence and betrayal. This includes their accidentally kidnapping Officer Honda’s son which triggers a subplot where the rebel kid and Honda’s son bond and share strips of celluloid and watch films in an old cinema. This cinema nods to the black-and-white film footage seen at the opening credits - which also casts a satirical light on all these replicants as just an extension of all that nonsense. Of course, this reference to celluloid dates this immensely in a digital age. This short-lived kidnapping triggers the revelation that Officer Honda is also an android, although he was unaware.

Wu, it seems, has reprogrammed the battle androids of the apocalyptic war, apparently making the world to his liking. Wu wears a shirt splashed with pink (faded blood?), dislikes breeding, acts a little slimy around his sax-playing catamite. ‘Final’ is homophobic in the same way that the first ‘DOA’ is misogynistic: it surely is guilty of that in some way, but as with all Miike there seems to be much more at play than meanness and such negativity does not strike as the agenda. It’s all grist-for-the-mill for Miike’s anything-goes mentality. Perversely, we are not going to find nuance in Dictator Wu as a predatory gay madman, but we might find a little nuance in Ryô’s and Honda’s experiences of being androids; and the homophobia is turned inside-out when – in a further satirical take on ‘Tetsuo’ (which was a coming-out film all of its own) – our two leads have a showdown. They have a decent little melee and then, heading for that outrageous ending, they merge into a crazy phallic robot which seems to satirise not only the homocentric nature of gangster and fighting genres, but also the fetishising of mutation and technology of the anime genre. Miike seems to care not at the ridiculous conclusion: it nods to the old film footage but also to the previous conclusions of the ‘DOA’ films and the appearance of the cosmos throughout the series. And then it’s as if the previous outrageousness turns throughout the series makes some sense if they were always just replicants… or something.

It certainly explains their sudden powers at the end of ‘DOA’ and the seeming cyborg duck castration in the childrens’ play during ‘Birds’ (yes, you read that correctly). The two leads melding together to make a phallic robot, seeming to then recall their roles in the previous films, certainly brings front-and-centre the homoerotic undertows of the first instalments. It’s audacious, ridiculous, nonsensical, funny and shows that the homophobia surrounding Wu shouldn’t be trusted and certainly isn’t the whole story. The silliness of the machismo of the action genre has surely been a prime target throughout the series.

‘Final’ is so different and undoubtedly the lesser work, but when taken as a whole, its go-nowhere story with a sudden outrageous finale is totally in keeping with the series as a whole. It is eccentric and fascinating. The downbeat turn of the drama is only obscured because there is the sudden mania of the denouement which feels stuck on. But even the scrappy nature of the narrative seems to point that Miike isn’t interested in filler and of the wealth of ideas crashing and splashing into one  another. Even if the whole series is ultimately some kind of cyborg dream of past lives, or something, then that is what we will go along with.

^^^

Miike has used the same two characters and put them in three different 'DOA' scenarios like they are reincarnations, different models of the same character throughout time and genre. Rikki is often unintentionally laughable with his macho-posing. Shô is the more playful and flexible performer and manages to reach genuine character and pathos amidst the absurdities.

The flaws are obvious: haphazard pacing and revelations just come out of nowhere for example. Some may find this confusing; others may just see it as cutting out the extraneous stuff and allowing the audience to piece things together. It’s no surprise in interviews with Shô and Rikki that they both convey that there was a sense of improvisation when working on ‘Dead or Alive’. Such scattershot plotting ordinarily doesn’t convince me in a lot of Eastern cinema, but Miike’s sense of the chaotic seems to me to be so aligned with deconstructing genre tropes in the name of anarchic film-making that it works. It also means that it is usually on second watches that I truly determine what I feel. For example, initially I enjoyed ‘Birds’ the most, but on repeat watch I think equally highly of ‘DOA’ and I was more open to the merits of ‘Final’. They all centre on outsiders trying to do best for whatever family units they have, all contain sentiment and the ludicrous, the inspired and unruly, violence and melancholy to create a series that is frequently brilliant, silly and riveting in equal measure. Often all at once.

"Bangkok Dangerous"

Oxide PangDun & Danny Pang
2000, Thailand

Actually, there isn’t too much “dangerous” in the Pang brothers’ soft-centred hit-man tale. Oh, plenty of blood and shooting, but nothing that will trouble or tax the genre. The excess is all in the aesthetic and tricks with which the Pangs overwrite every scene: they cannot film someone washing their face in a sink without multiple cuts to a turning of the faucet. Filters colour everything, every action affected in some filmmaking tic, nothing left to breathe on its own. The film chokes on its own style, but it isn’t necessarily stylish: its action scenes edited to such an extreme that they are often whittled down to incomprehensibility; the doomed romaniticism is saddled with childish scripting so that they whole things ends up being something like a teenagers playing at gangsters playing in funky clothes. But back to style: it does not have the genre savvy or let’s-screw-with-this attitude of Takashi Miike; it is not a film that could ever achieve the elegance of  Wong Kar-Wai, no matter how hard it uses colour and changes film stock. But if you have come for style-over-substance, there is that.

For Love's Sake

For  Love’s Sake:
The Legend of Love & Sincerity
Ai to makoto

Takashi Miike, Japan, (2012)

Takashi Miike is so prolific and diverse that’s it is almost a chore to keep up with him; he’s a master of genres and as punk as he is classical and consistently unpredicatable and surprising. Of late: “13 Assassins” and “Hari-Kari” one moment and “Yatterman” and then “For Love’s Sake” next. This also means that he shall often throw anything but the kitchen sink in if the material is a little, shall we say, silly and underwhelming. This is helpful when he is doing his Manga adaptations, because Manga is often quite bonkers and narratively wild and emotionally hyperbolic and ridiculous; or at least the bulk of Manga that gets adapted seems to be. “For Love’s Sake” is, for the most part, delirously silly and over-egged: it comes across like a parody not only of overwrought Japanese school dramas but also of Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet” and the teen romance genre as a whole. The performances of the musical numbers are, for the most part, very funny: the tracks are a mixture of Japanese ‘60s pop tracks and original songs with straight enough lyrics, but it is the characters lauching into musical numbers as if they believe they are in their own musical (which they are) when most characters around them aren’t quite so sure that makes it so all so amusing. Manga and Miike is often prone to changing mood and mashing up extreme and sentimental elements indiscriminately, and if the first half of “For Love’s Sake” feels like barmy parody, and is definitely funny, the second half is dragged down by that sentiment that asks us to take seriously the absurd and unhinged declarations of love by characters that feels very much like unhinged psychology.

No one in “For Love’s Sake” is in good mental health. We are expected to go along with a main macho character, Makoto (Satoshi Tsumabuki) who solves everything with violence and who is indeed so violent that he will happily take on entire gangs and come out on top. Oh, and who happily slaps women around. Then there is Ai (Emi Takei), a girl who is delusionally obsessed with Makoto and whose insane pursuit of him with declarations of anti-violence and love are so trite, they are hilarious and surely satirical of youthful romancing; all that being in love with the idea of being in love, etc. When he keeps telling her where to go, you agree with him. Then there is Hiroshi who is also obsessively in love with Ai with that nerdy tactic of hanging around her in the hope that one day she might fall in love with him: the gag becomes that he turns up everywhere after her, but make no mistake that he is a stalker. The school of delinquents adds to the bunch of Asian dramas that make it look as if Asian education is a hellhole (I am thinking of, oh, “Confessions”, “All About Lilu Chou-Chou”, “Whispering Corridors”, “Friend”, etc etc). That the gangs are mostly femal dominated is a nice mixing-up of typical classroom gangs and this leaves plenty of room for the gag that most of the main bad girls are in love with Makoto. Oh, and there is the seventeen year-old boy who has the body of a middle-aged man too (he has some kind of aging disease??). It all comes across as the fantasy of some dysfunctional lovesick teenager with a fevered pop-addled imagination.

My favourite moment of violence? An unbroken take where the camera stays over Makoto’s shoulder as he wipes out an entire gang stuffing full a hospital corridor. But there is also the opening fight during which Makoto sings throughout the punches and kicking. All the dance numbers in the first half have their moments, though.

It’s overlong by at half hour and at least two songs and the earnestness drags as much as the emotional outpourings, although even the later passages are alleviated by sudden bursts of inventiveness: a bad girl’s flashback to her childhood trauma is brilliantly rendered as animation, for example. Even the closing Anime flashback feels like it might possess genuine emotional effect if we were not being asked to associate it with such ridiculous and two-dimensional characters. This, however, is typical of Manga and Anime where we are often to take at face value that people are in love, despite the lack of convincing romantic detail. Characters generally just end up shouting one another's names in various states of hysterics. Miike is also not always one to turn to for emotional engagement: there is often the sense that his films are experiments in free-form cinematic tricks and tropes rather than speaking deeply to the audience, but this depends upon the particular project (films such as "Rainy Dog", "Hari-Kari" and "Big Bang Love: Juvenile A" are different stories altogether).

“For Love’s Sake” is gorgeous to look at, funny and violent for the most part, then undone by the typical Manga sentimentality. If you are looking for the real deal about growing up with neglect and violence, look to Miike’s two “Young Thug” films for revelations, scathing insight and some genuine emotional engagement. “For Love’s Sake” shall not win many new Miike fans, but even at his most conventional, he often seems to be making all the films all at once and no one quite does it like him. There is no doubt that it is at least unforgettable, because Miike's work always leaves some kind of aftertaste, even if this example is candyfloss with punches and pretences of substance.

P.S.: The British Film Institute puff piece for "For Love's Sake" by Tony Raynes says, "This is the kind of movie that hits you, and it feels like a kiss." This indeed is indicative of the problematic nature of deciding what one is meant to take from the film if looking for any depth. It is also one of those faux-poetical nonsense summaries that seems to think equating hitting with kissing is something lyrical.

13 ASSASSINS

13 ASSASSINS - Jûsan-nin no shikaku

Takashi Miike, Japan-UK, 2010

I know that for a Western audience it is ordinarily “Audition” or “Ichi the Killer” that acts as their introduction to Takashi Miike, but for me it was “Visitor Q”. It was “Visitor Q” that truly told me that Miike was a master of not only shock cinema, but cinema and genre overall. What an induction. The most incredible social satire, a real funny and unapologetic shocker. Miike famously has an incredible output. 50 films to date and counting or something. He has tried everything. And he can do anything. Working your way through his back catalogue will take you from the sublime, the manic, the carefully crafted to the more workmanlike. But even at his most prosaic – “One Missed Call” and “Bodyguard Kiba” – there is always evidence of Miike’s barely tethered inventiveness, always at least one remarkable moment. If I say he is a master of genre, then you may pick any genre that you favour and he has set a precedent in it. He understands genre. His is an incredibly gonzo imagination but he also possesses great discipline and exceptional artistry.

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Take for example Miike’s adaptation of Eiichi Kudo’s “The Thirteen Assassins”, the 1963 shogun film. Miike’s “13 Assassins” starts with a episode of seppuku which is no less gruelling for the act itself taking place offscreen: Miike trusts that all we need to see is the actor’s tortured face; and yes it is enough. But this is also not to say that Miike will hold back from shock and explicitness. Soon, we gaze upon a traumatised woman whose limbs have been cut off by the insane Shogun lord. Next, we shall see this lord using a family as target practice. Later, the blood will flow. And how. There is a steady and pensive nature to the first half of “13 Warriors”, in which the chilling atrocities carried out by the Shogun lord - Lord Naritsugu (Gorô Inagaki) - have time to ferment. This is a villain of incredible vintage. His cruelty is boundless and moored to his philosophy that to be a Shogun is to be a God, that cruelty is the natural right and extension of the absolute power he possesses. It is a power buffered by the way of the samurai who do his bidding, who must die for him and never question why. “13 Assassins” has much to say about the atrocities allowed by rampant feudalism and blind obedience. The themes of the film are timeless just as the film feels timeless: it already feels like a classic.
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The inspirations and references are easy to conjure – Kurosawa, etc – but, again, Miike’s mastery of genre is unsurpassed and all his own. We have 13 assassins even before the wealth of side characters that populate all the political intrigue; but Miike knows that we know the nature of this film, that we know our Kurosawa and Leone and Ford and all those other classics. He knows that he can sketch the assassins with hints of stock types and allow fine actors to bring them to life and that shall be enough for the audience to keep track. There is no need for flashbacks and great back-stories, although we get a little of that also. The beginning is the slow burn: our villain is vile, our assassins assembled, our blood chilled and the atmosphere thick with pending confrontation. Miike allows the superficially slow pace (a repeat viewing will reveal that, in actually, it is not so slow and that narrative is delivered in a number of swift set-pieces with often underplayed and straightforward drama) and the dour, low naturalistic lighting to cast a doom-laden, almost uncanny atmosphere, and expectation for the confrontation builds on and on.

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The way of the samurai is dying away and, most of all, these samurai want a last chance to use their skills and die by the way of the sword, as they wish. There is a lot about honour and choice in “13 Assassins” too. Even for the youngest member who merely wants to get the chance to try out his skills and die like his heroes. There are a handful of stand-offs to whet the appetite and some gorgeous photography to keep us gripped as expectation mounts further.

 
And then … and then Miike offers us something sublime. A battle that takes half of the film. A battle in which he unleashes all the repressed violence that has been building up. A battle that relishes the old fashioned cinematic joy of a handful of heroic types up against impossible odds (and it feels joyously far from the macho-heroics of American action cinema). A battle that is built not from CGI (although probably that too), but collapsing sets, giant gates, hundreds of extras, lashings of blood and, exhilaratingly, burning and rampaging bulls. It is one of the greatest battle scenes ever filmed. If it sometimes falls into the modern trap of action conveyed by a shaking camera and too many cuts, threatening incomprehensibility at times, it also follows the battle over rooftops and through streets, alleys and buildings and with the thirteen assassins without ever truly losing us. It is quite remarkable and thrilling. Also remarkable is that throughout this cinematic exhilaration, Miike never loses the sense of doom, of the themes already established, of existential musing on what it means to die for something - blindly or knowlingly - of choosing to challenge the wrong of the established order and hierarchy.
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I never thought I would see a new Miike film at the cinema (he makes so many and they generally bypass the London big screen), but I did and I was reminded why he is one of my favourite directors. I knew, when the battle scene began, that I was in the midst of watching a masterpiece. Having deliberately avoiding reading anything about it, the battle scene surprised and dazzled me. But all the time, I knew that the whole of the film was so much more. An instant classic. It straddles everything that has been celebrated about classic cinema with all the artistry and tricks of modern cinema, much like “There Will Be Blood” and “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward John Ford”. The quiet of the aftermath and the slightly sly humour and final sentiment of the closing exchange between survivors continues to elevate the film to the very end. The bloodletting and the samurai code is finally dismissed and mocked even as the honour and sacrifice of our eponymous heroes is respected and makes the viewer wonder what it is to die for duty. Or, as Nick Schager summarises, “Miike isn't interested in shades of gray, but rather in celebrating the dignity of forfeiting one's comfort and livelihood (if not life itself) for a worthy cause.”

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“13 Assassins” is delirious, mad, elegant, thoughtful, cathartic, dazzling in scope, funny, gritty and brutal. It feels both like art and pure cinema in that is luxuriates in spectacle, storytelling and man’s confrontations with himself and others, and his place in the universe and the natural world. Another Miike masterpiece.