Pale Flower

I've got a fair number of foreign films that I haven't reviewed either on DVD or on my DVR. It's been over a year since I reviewed a Japanese-language film (or, if it was more recent, I forgot to include the "Foreign" tag). So I decided that since I recorded Pale Flower when it showed up recently and would like to free up some space on my DVR, I'd watch that one first.

Ryō Ikebe plays Mutaki, a member of the yakuza (the Japanese equivalent of the Mafia) who has just gotten out of jail for the murder of a member of a rival gang in Tokyo. He goes to a gambling hall, which is where he meets mysterious Saeko (Mariko Kaga). She's the only woman in the entire room, playing some sort of game with traditional Japanese playing cards that would probably be known to Japanese and as such is never explained to the viewer. Mutaki is immediately smitten with Saeko.

Mutaki has other women in his life, however, as well as other problems. While Mutaki was away in prison, the two main gangs in Tokyo found that their territory was getting muscled in on by a gang from Osaka, to the point that the two gang leaders called a truce. Mutaki doesn't know that at first, and there are people who want to settle scores with Mutaki, including a young man who attacks Mutaki in a bowling alley and, failing, cuts off one of his fingers in the yakuza tradition.

Saeko, for her part, likes the gambling, as well as other thrills. But the current gambling isn't enough for her, so she wants Mutaki to find her a gambling place that has higher stakes. He does, but this place will pose a problem for Mutaki and Saeko. That's Yoh, a man who sits by the far wall and watches, never saying anything. Nobody quite knows Yoh's full background, except that he's half-Chinese, from Hong Kong, and spends time doing dope, which is an even more serious cultural issue in Japan than in the US.

There's also the day-to-day business of being a gangster, as Mutaki is given the task of getting a nightclub owner providing entertainment to use the Tokyo gang for protection instead of the Osaka gang. And, with the Osaka gang continue to tread on the turf of the Tokyo gangs, Mutaki is going to be asked to go back to his old hitman ways and bump off a member of the Osaka gang.

There's a lot to like in Pale Flower, most notable the cinematography and composition, as well as the depiction of Tokyo as it was in the early 1960s, just before the Olympics came and really started to change the place. It fell down for me slightly in terms of the plot which seemed to me to be missing something that I can't quite put my finger on. It doesn't help that not being Japanese, I didn't get exactly what it was they were gambling on and how the game worked. I don't gamble, but if I were going to do so, I'd want to do something like poker or backgammon where I could feel like there's at least some element of skill. These games looked like pure luck. But those are minor flaws.

Pale Flower is available on DVD from the Criterion Collection, and is one I'd quite recommend.