Ah, the wonders of small children with germs. My son was kind enough to pass along a wee bit of the flu which kept me from heading to work, thus providing enough time to take a good look at these Black Society Trilogy DVDs that I’ve had sitting around for the past couple weeks and it was time well spent. Read on for my thoughts.
As we’ve mentioned before on these pages the new Artsmagic DVD label in the US is quickly establishing itself as the go-to source for all things Takashi Miike in North America. Though it’s unlikely that Artsmagic will ever catch up to the ultra-prolific film maker’s level of output – Miike routinely releases five or six films a year – they’re certainly giving it the ol’ college try with a string of well-presented films already to their credit and a stack more ready to release within the next year.
Coming from Artsmagic at the end of August is Miike’s Black Society Trilogy, a trio of films linked not by plot or character, but by theme. Though each of the three crime films – Shinjuku Triad Society, Rainy Dog, Ley Lines – has its own distinct voice they all revolve around issues of racism, of people pushed to the absolute outer fringes of society due largely to their mixed, or outright foreign, ethnicity. This fixation on people on the fringes of society has marked Miike’s entire career but nowhere is the emphasis stronger than here.
The first film – Shinjuku Triad Society – revolves around a dirty cop of mixed Japanese / Chinese heritage tracking down a gang of human organ traders. The gang is primarily made up of gay Taiwanese men –Yes, that does mean a lot of gay sex on screen. This is a Miike film after all – who also happen to be actively recruiting the cop’s brother into the gang. The film is shot in a grainy, naturally lit, hand held style much like the independent crime films that came out of the US in the 70’s and that naturalism just makes the typical Miike moments – a severed head, massive sprays of blood, etc – that much more shocking when they come. Critics of Miike’s work often brand him a woman hater for his frequent harsh treatment of women on screen and while I don’t necessarily think that’s an accurate interpretation of what he’s doing there’s certainly no denying that any time there’s a strong female character in his films there’s a fighting chance that she will be graphically and violently raped, and if that’s the case there is also a good chance that she will enjoy it. Both of these things do happen in this film. Shinjuku Triad Society is a strong entry into the canon of Miike’s crime films filled with strong performances, solid film work and gritty, unflinching violence.
Rainy Dog, anchored by a strong, morally ambiguous performance from the great Sho Aikawa, is easily the strongest film of the three. Sharing a similar visual style with Shinjuku Triad Society – i.e. lots of hand held, grainy, naturally lit shots – Rainy Dog features Aikawa as Yuji, a Japanese hit man living in exile in Taiwan after being abandoned by his gang. He works a laborious day job in a meat packing plant, which leads to a visually arresting opening sequence, while also taking on small time hits for the local Taiwanese gang boss. Yuji lives a completely isolated life, cut off both from his gang and the local culture thanks to his lack of Chinese, with the only connection to his past being a hit man from a rival gang who has been forbidden from returning to Japan until Yuji is dead. The story really gets rolling when a woman Yuji barely remembers bursts into his squalid home and thrusts a young, mute boy who she claims is his son at him before running into the pouring rain and disappearing into a waiting taxi. Ah, you’re thinking this is a hit-man-with-a-heart story, right? Not by a long shot. Yuji, far from convinced that the child is actually his, treats the boy with complete disdain, rarely if ever speaking to him and leaving him entirely to fend for himself. Aikawa delivers such a strong performance here that he leaves us with a broad range of possible interpretations. Is he simply denying responsibility? Is he trying to avoid any emotional entanglements? Is he trying to buffer the child from his own violent lifestyle, which he can see no hope of escaping from? It’s a complex film that succeeds entirely on the strength of Aikawa’s charisma as a leading man. Not only is Rainy Dog the best of this trilogy but it’s one of the strongest films of the entire hit man genre.
And finally we come to Ley Lines, the most technically ambitious of the three films with frequent use of color filters and some more aggressive editing than was featured in the previous two parts of the trilogy. Ley Lines tells the story of a group of mixed Japanese / Chinese youth who move to Tokyo in hopes of escaping the bigotry and violence that has marked their lives thus far. They are promptly robbed and fall in with a low level drug dealer in order to survive, with their thoughts and dreams quickly turning to moving overseas to start a new life. Ley Lines was a little bit disappointing following closely behind the powerhouse Rainy Dog. That Miike style was present in full force but Ley Lines lacks some of the complex character development that make the first two films in the trilogy work as well as they do. We’re just not given quite enough to buy into these characters as fully as we did those in the preceding films. This isn’t to say Ley Lines isn’t a good film – there’s plenty of action and a lot of solid acting and film work to carry you through – it just doesn’t quite meet the standards set but what came before.
As is now becoming the norm with Artsmagic each film has a quality selection of bonus features. All three titles come in anamorphic widescreen and include commentary tracks from Japanese film expert Tom Mes, interviews with Takashi Miike and editor Yasushi Shimamura, and a selection of biographies, filmographies and trailers. The trilogy is available both in stand alone editions and as a three film gatefold box set. Trailers for all three films are available at www.artsmagicdvd.com
