Reviewing Masahiro Shinoda’s Pale Flower is not an easy task for me. I wasn’t even aware of the Japanese New Wave movement before watching it, but once I learned it drew from similar inspirations as the French New Wave I wasn’t in the least bit surprised considering the one name that never escaped me while watching Pale Flower was Jean-Luc Godard. The comparison, however, was more of a feeling, more of a sense of directorial presence and control and the styles seem to simply match up. I also noticed hints of The Third Man and Sweet Smell of Success in the noir atmosphere, wet stone and dark shadowy corners of the night.
The experimental score by Toru Takemitsu also stands out and as you begin to make your way through the slim, but informative special features even more corners of this world will begin to reveal themselves that you hadn’t even noticed before. And this is where my understanding of Pale Flower grew, as much as I could respect the film for its artistic merits I can’t say I was ever truly in touch with the allegory at its core.
What is Pale Flower all about? Well, based on the narrative it’s about Muraki (Ryo Ikebe), a yakuza gangster fresh out of prison who begins to find new life amidst Hanafuda (a game that’s played throughout, but never explained) gamblers. Muraki quickly gets mixed up with a young woman whose addiction to gambling drives them into dark corners of the underworld and he soon finds himself heading down the criminal path once again, climaxing in an operatic ending that had me thinking John Woo must keep this film running on a loop.
All of this said, the takeaway for me was nothing more than an artistic noir that’s highly stylish and poetic. These are all reasons to like a film, but I wasn’t bowled over by any means, just merely satisfied. The revelation, however, came while watching the special features and listening to film scholar Peter Grilli’s selected-scene audio commentary.
The same details are discussed in the commentary as well as the video interview with Shinoda, but I’ll use Grilli’s words to describe the underlying meaning of the film that I never would have known without this disc’s assistance:
If you think about all of this in an allegorical way, which is how Shinoda has also described this particular scene and the film as a whole, the protagonist represents Japan’s impotent position between much larger forces that are beyond his ability to control. For Japan as a nation, Japan was stuck in the middle of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Powerless, trying to figure out what its identity as a nation was and Shinoda was very conscious of that in describing this film as an allegory of that situation, of Japan like this protagonist had no future — appeared to have no future — because it was being manipulated by the outside world, as he is as well.
[…]
In Japan at that moment, China — and what this character Yoh represents as a figure from China coming into Japan, a Chinese gangster in Japan — was, How would China influence Japan’s future? If, as Shinoda says, the Muraki represents Japan floating in the world between the Soviet Union and the United States? How is China going to affect that relationship?
China, as we all know just looking at the map, is this huge, looming, enormous giant of Asia, which in the years since this film was made, China is becoming increasingly powerful throughout Asia and throughout the world. At this time in the 1960s China was the unknown element in the world. Japanese culturally felt a huge debt to China, but also throughout Japanese history there was a fear of China, fear of the moment when China would suppress Japan. This love hate relationship between China and Japan is lurking in Japanese cultural history and you feel it very strongly in this film.
I never would have seen any of this had Shinoda and Grilli not pointed it out in the features. I’m not knowledgeable enough on Chinese and Japanese history, but once it was explained to me the film does begin to take on a whole new meaning all while remaining a fascinating piece of art.
The description of the allegory also gives greater weight to the decisions made by the film’s central character and the film’s climax. Whether these details make it a film worth buying I’m not so sure, but I am confident that giving you the information above will certainly help you make your decision.
This isn’t a film for everyone although I’m sure the mention of “yakuza” and “noir” caused some ears to immediately perk up. Personally I’m a big fan of the French New Wave, which is why some aspects of this film immediately captured my attention. I was drawn into its moody atmosphere, but there’s something that didn’t quite compute. As far as other Japanese New Wave directors go I’m incredibly green.
I’ve seen Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of Senses and Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, but other than that I’m a blank slate. Names such as Susumu Hani, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Koreyoshi Kurahara, Yasuzo Masumura, Yoshishige Yoshida and Shohei Imamura mean nothing to me, which is reason enough to say I need to do more exploring before weighing in with a final opinion. There is clearly more below the surface of this film than I was initially able to grasp on to, and for that reason I’d say my opinion on this one is still a work in progress.
