InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 16

KICKING THE CANON
Kurosawa's classic, Suzuki's crime tale has no place for such
noble aims. Joji "Jo" Mizuno (the famously chipmunk-cheeked Joe
Shishido) is an ex-cop driven solely by revenge. Having been
wrongfully convicted of embezzlement, the newly released Jo
becomes singularly focused on avenging the murder of his loyal
former partner, whose death was staged to look like a lover's
suicide.
Jo's pursuit of "justice" becomes a relentless, violent, and slyly
comical odyssey through Kobe's criminal underworld. Although
1966's Tokyo Drifter would mark Suzuki's first identifiably
deconstructionist take on the genre, Youth of the Beast scans as
similarly satirical. The film occupies a space between
straightforward gangster film homage and Godardian
pranksterism, amplifying genre tropes to near-absurd levels with
increasingly
convoluted
violence, plot
machinations,
and set
pieces — at one
point, Jo disposes
of his adversaries
while hanging
upside down from a chandelier — while occasionally pushing
things into the realm of the avant-garde. For every blade
violently shoved under a fingernail, there is a shot of radiant red
flowers illuminating the otherwise black-and-white frames of the
film's intro. And Suzuki's farcical tough-guy introduction for Jo —
he beats up young delinquents before heading to a club to drink
and beat up some more people — feels like a purposeful
escalation of Breathless' Bogart-obsessed main character, Michel
(Jean-Paul Belmondo).
Youth of the Beast’s gritty textures don't rival Tokyo Drifter's
arresting production design. But Suzuki still provides his share of
striking images, such as when Jo invades the office of crime
boss Shinzuke Onodera (Kinzo Shin). The head honcho's office
walls are illuminated by images of American and Japanese
B-movie gangster melodramas — the kind of films that Suzuki
was slowly but surely leaving behind. (Incidentally, Onodera, as
well as his rival Tetsuo Nomoto (Akiji Kobayashi), are depicted as
weaselly, bottom-line-obsessed businessmen, far removed from
the honor codes often employed to romanticize Japanese
organized crime.) This juxtaposition ultimately acknowledges the
framework that the film — for all its clever subversions —
operates within, obscuring the visceral violence that ensues by
calling attention to its artificiality.
This unsentimental, stylized approach would prove influential on
filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, Park Chan-wook, John Woo,
and Takashi Miike,
whose genre efforts
often echo Beast's
elaborate brutality.
Even Scorsese might
have looked to
Keiko's (Naomi
Hoshi) agonizing
junkie floor crawl for
The Wolf of Wall
Street's infamous
Quaaludes scene.
Suzuki's later, more
surreal efforts
overshadow the
legacy of the first
true Suzuki original,
somewhat, and he
remains tragically
under-discussed as
a talented dramatic
filmmaker (1964's
Gate of Flesh and
1965's Story of a
Prostitute rank
amongst his best
work). But it’s with
Youth of the Beast
that his anarchic
vision truly snapped into focus, and at last converged with a
searing poignancy, felt in its ending: after the antagonist finally
dies a horrible, razor blade-related death, Jo succumbs to
despair and has a vision of a grayscale graveyard, where
flowers once again gleam with red-hot menace. — FRED
BARRETT
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