The Taishō Roman Trilogy

ZIGEUNERWEISEN

(1980)

Dir - Seijun Suzuki

Overall: GOOD

 

Filmmaker Seijun Suzuki's Zigeunerweisen serves as ground zero for a career resurgence, a stylistic shift from his earlier genre work, and as the first in a trilogy of movies that explore ambiguous narratives with haunting, imprecise motifs that welcomes endless interpretation.  At a hundred and forty-five minutes, it is purposely challenging, coming at a point in Suzuki's career where he had little to lose and everything to gain by going for broke in adapting Kyakken Uchida's novel Disk of Sarasate as something impenetrable.  The narrative begs endless questions as to its small crop of characters and what they metaphorically represent, as well as whether or not they are alive, imaginary, or spectres that are struggling to understand the nature of what befalls them.  Stylistically, it balances odd eroticism, straight-faced black humor, cold performances, a significant lack of incidental music, unnerving supernatural elements, and overall strangeness that could have as little or as much to do with man's inner duality, possessive and dismissive tendencies towards women, and the cultural shift of a post-war, modernized Japan.

KAGERO-ZA

(1981)

Dir - Seijun Suzuki

Overall: GOOD

 

Equipped with a larger budget and the lauded reputation of his previous entry Zigeunerweisen at his disposal, filmmaker Seijun Suzuki's Kagero-Za, (Heat-Haze Theatre), boasts another impossible "story" while embracing the visual poetry that is possible within the cinematic medium.  In other words, this is a movie that "makes no sense" as it were, but can wield endless interpretations for those that feel compelled by its alluring images.  The second in Suzuki's artistically liberating Taishō Roman Trilogy, it concerns a central playwright character who wanders through a series of encounters with two women who may be the same woman, as well as said woman's husband who always has a shotgun on his person.  Anything else plot wise that could be shared would merely involve describing the individual set pieces which grow more and more strange as it goes along.  Whereas Zigeunerweisen seemed to be concerned with similar themes on paper, its companion piece here is arcane in an aggressive sense as there are no simple solutions to be found.  That said, such an assumption can only be made if one was to see this as a puzzle that needed solving.  Instead, basking in what Suzuki and cinematographer Kazue Nagatsuka have been able to capture on screen is the most obvious and immediately rewarding route to take.  Though it may be challenging to a fault, arthouse enthusiasts need look no further for something to sink their teeth into.

 

YUMEJI

(1991)

Dir - Seijun Suzuki

Overall: MEH

 

Ten years after the one-two ethereal punch of Zigeunerweisen and Kagero-Za, filmmaker Seijun Suzuki and screenwriter Yōzō Tanaka closed out the series with Yumeji; the most narratively impenetrable of the lot.  This is the only movie in the trilogy to be a biopic of sorts as it features the poet/painter Yumeji Takehisa as its central protagonist, though considering this a conventional telling of an actual person's life, (as well as a conventional anything), would be a grave misstep.  It was nothing new for Suzuki to indulge in the surreal at this point in his career, but it is more in the levels and end result that differentiate it from the still arcane structure of his earlier entries.  The movie detours regularly into evocative, strange imagery which certainly present highlights that are fitting to a story with a real life artist at its center, but all of the characters are intentionally impossible to grasp.  Takehisa was known for his fascination with beautiful women and three of them float in and out of the film, with everyone's mannerisms bouncing between sudden bursts of energetic rage, confusion, sorrow, lust, and calm introspection.  At no point is the audience any wiser as to where it is all leading and once we are given the final shots of Takehisa's painting “Song of Evening Primrose” as the camera slowly pulls back from it, a sense of frustrated curiosity permeates more than anything else.