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Nude, gaunt, sorrowful figures behind the opening credits, like a salacious peddler's tracing of Guernica, prepare the "city of savages" that is postwar Tokyo. Seijun Suzuki's metaphor is the meat market in the rubble, mouthy prostitutes as merchandise and American GIs as consumers, symbolism so blunt the heroines can't help laughing: "Something's crazy when our bodies cost the same as beef!" The streetwalkers are feral businesswomen, spitting on observers, flashing tattoos, picking rumbles, flogging each other in their bombed-out dungeon. The fox in the henhouse is the battlefield survivor (Joe Shishido), a loutish ex-soldier who gleefully takes to stabbing Yanks, slapping crones and trafficking contraband penicillin for the big Yakuza boss. The hardened pro (Satoko Kasai) and the naive novice (Yumiko Nogawa) reach for whips to win his affections. "Hit bottom, suffer the hard times, rebuild from scratch." An uproarious caricature of Mizoguchi's Street of Shame, sweaty softcore titillation continuously spiked by Suzuki's political vehemence and bottomless bag of visual slashes. Thought-balloon superimpositions, baffling singalongs, cutout sets and cardboard sunsets, a screen doused in crimson, green, yellow, purple to match the characters' togs. Flags abound in hell, the Stars and Stripes trumpets a rape and the Rising Sun blankets the cackling-blubbering brute. A Godardian bit plunks the camera down in a bustling noodle shop, fastened to the back of the irritated rookie's head while a geisha's disembodied voice gives an incantatory lament ("A woman belongs in the home... My father loved my mother, and my mother loved my father..."). Sex for love is an offense like dreaming of escape, the outcast is severely punished for both. The feverish pigpen is last seen in a panoramic crane shot, "we live in a democracy now." With Kayo Matsuo, Tamiko Ishii, Misako Tominaga, Isao Tamagawa, and Chico Roland.
--- Fernando F. Croce |