Kanto Wanderer

Year: 1963

Grade: B+

Country: Japan

Director: Suzuki

Review

seijun suzuki (branded to kill, tokyo drifter, tattooed life) has yet to disappoint me – his direction consistently pushes the envelope, his stories are always interesting on some level, and his visual storytelling can be about as inventive and expressionistic as you’re likely to see. the story is shakespearean in that it’s serpentine and involves a lot of subplot. katsura, the main character, is played by a sort of poor man’s tatsuya nakadai in akira kobayashi. this isn’t to slight his performance – quite the contrary, his performance was very good which is exactly why i compared him to nakadai. there are so many visual flourishes throughout he film that recalling them all here would be lengthy and impossible (because of my memory), but suffice it to say that suzuki is at top form here. his later films (branded to kill, tokyo drifter) are more ambitious in their direction (he toys with space and time more), but this film strikes a balance between the experimental, the artistic, the expressionistic and the classical. he’s able to do things that most wouldn’t even attempt (like splitting the screen with a fuzzy amber line, or using spotlights during a fight, or changing the background lighting in certain scenes) in such a way that it adds to the film’s depth and feel, rather than detracting from it because it comes off as too pedantic or avant-garde. naturally this is a judgment call, but in my judgment he’s able to pull it off without it coming off as forced or experimental for the sake of experimentation (not that that doesn’t have its place, because it does). of course the film is more than just a visual tour de force, it’s also a tale of a bygone age. katsura is a youngish yakuza who prefers the old yakuza code, but the world around him has changed. gambling and women are in and honor is lost. like a kurosawa film, it’s a world replete with amateurs and bottom dwellers.