YOUTH OF THE BEAST ***
Seijun Suzuki1963
IDEA: A former cop, recently released from prison for embezzlement, infiltrates two rival yakuza groups to destroy them and find the killer of his former police partner.
BLURB: Combining aesthetic surface pleasures with a guiding postmodernist ethos of pastiche and self-reflexivity, Seijun Suzuki’s films are vibrant blasts of pop-art madness. While not quite as spectacular as some of his later work, Youth of the Beast is entirely cohesive with the director’s inventive, gonzo genre experiments. The tropes are familiar - an antihero with a shady past, gang rivalries, unreliable women, subterfuge and double-crossings - but the thrill is in how Suzuki abstracts these elements so they function in excess of their narrative meanings, transforming them into signifiers of their own pulpy sensationalism. Temporal and spatial continuity are less important than the jazz-like rhythms established by movement, composition, and color; teeming with visual information on multiple planes, Suzuki’s widescreen frames host a riot of activity that at once conveys a modernizing Tokyo and a newly adventurous kind of cinema. Despite the deliberate, very noir-ish convolutions of Youth of the Beast’s plot, Suzuki directs with such confidence, flair, and freewheeling energy that rarely does even the most questionable idea or story development feel like it could be any other way. Joe Shishido dispatching yakuza while hanging by his feet from a rope attached to the scrawniest chandelier ever? It makes sense in Suzuki’s elastic world, where cartoonish men are parodic icons of machismo, and violence is a spectacle both of cinematic excitement and sheer human inanity.
IDEA: A former cop, recently released from prison for embezzlement, infiltrates two rival yakuza groups to destroy them and find the killer of his former police partner.
BLURB: Combining aesthetic surface pleasures with a guiding postmodernist ethos of pastiche and self-reflexivity, Seijun Suzuki’s films are vibrant blasts of pop-art madness. While not quite as spectacular as some of his later work, Youth of the Beast is entirely cohesive with the director’s inventive, gonzo genre experiments. The tropes are familiar - an antihero with a shady past, gang rivalries, unreliable women, subterfuge and double-crossings - but the thrill is in how Suzuki abstracts these elements so they function in excess of their narrative meanings, transforming them into signifiers of their own pulpy sensationalism. Temporal and spatial continuity are less important than the jazz-like rhythms established by movement, composition, and color; teeming with visual information on multiple planes, Suzuki’s widescreen frames host a riot of activity that at once conveys a modernizing Tokyo and a newly adventurous kind of cinema. Despite the deliberate, very noir-ish convolutions of Youth of the Beast’s plot, Suzuki directs with such confidence, flair, and freewheeling energy that rarely does even the most questionable idea or story development feel like it could be any other way. Joe Shishido dispatching yakuza while hanging by his feet from a rope attached to the scrawniest chandelier ever? It makes sense in Suzuki’s elastic world, where cartoonish men are parodic icons of machismo, and violence is a spectacle both of cinematic excitement and sheer human inanity.
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