A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #39: Sei­jun Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter.

While this is another Sei­jun Suzuki gang­ster film, it is vastly dif­fer­ent from Branded to Kill on just about every point. Most notable is the use of bright swathes of sin­gle col­ors in dif­fer­ent scenes; the same set might be yel­low, then fuch­sia, then white at dif­fer­ent points in the film, and the color often changes in response to actions from the char­ac­ters. The film is less gritty and psy­cho­log­i­cally com­pelling than Branded to Kill, with more of a 1960s pop-​culture vibe, com­plete with its own mawk­ish pop bal­lad that var­i­ous char­ac­ters sing through­out the film. Despite this much more light­hearted tone, there is still sig­nif­i­cant ten­sion sur­round­ing the main character’s role in a com­pli­cated gang war.

This film is a good data point for mak­ing an argu­ment that Yakuza films are just updated samu­rai flicks. The main char­ac­ter, Tet­suya, is the equiv­a­lent of a ronin, except that while he thinks he’s left his gang, he’s still being used by it as a light­ning rod to under­mine other gangs in places out­side of Tokyo. This is fairly super­fi­cial to the main focus of the film, which is Tetsuya’s process of self-​actualization, but the twain meet in the final shootout. The film’s excel­lence is due to how stim­u­lat­ing each scene is, due in large part to the afore­men­tioned color schema, and fleshed out with the con­stant plot twists, musi­cal inter­ludes, styl­ized bat­tles and preter­nat­ural abil­i­ties of the var­i­ous gun­men in the film.

The com­pli­ca­tions of the plot are revealed in snip­pets much like manga or animé, the rapid changes and rever­sals are con­fus­ing, but slowly con­geal into an emo­tional tenor that reflects Tetsuya’s grow­ing cog­nizance and dis­gust with his sta­tus as a pawn of the crime lord he looked to as a father-​figure. It gets a bit con­fus­ing at times, there is another assas­sin, who looks a bit like Tet­suya, named Tet­suzo [both of them are called Tetsu at var­i­ous times in the sub­ti­tles] which made me think that there was a weird mul­ti­ple per­son­al­ity sub­text going on. This film’s place in the Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion fits a spe­cific niche of Japan­ese film­mak­ing that is usu­ally over­looked. It is easy to see how Suzuki drove his studio’s bat­shitin­sane, his styl­ized cre­ations are awe­some, but a def­i­nite trend away from the sure-​shots that stu­dios usu­ally like best.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Manohla Dargis
• The Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion Review
• KFCC Review
• Deep Focus Review
• Love HK Film Review