Night of the Felines

One of the first of 88 Films Roman Porno releases was Noboru Tanaka’s Watcher in the Attic, an understandably perverse if slow starting adaptation of Edogawa Rampo’s work – his Night of the Felines (1972) was then part of the second set of releases. Not a film I knew anything about, though a quick look up provided the minimal insight that it was his second feature, made four-years before Watcher in the Attic. 

Here, three friends work in the Turkish Delight, a Shinjuku soapland bathhouse, one of whom, Masako (Tomoko Katsura) is close to her neighbour Honda (Ken Yoshizawa), who spends his nights watching his new neighbours have sex and looking after his gay friend, Makoto (Hidetoshi Kageyama), who might be falling for a girl this time.  

With most reviews, I try and knock out the first draft right after watching the film but I found – partly due to being knackered, let’s be honest – I needed to let Night of the Felines settle and swim a bit inside my head. Why? Maybe because it’s a curious mixture of a film.

There are moments where you realise that, if given a different opportunity, the director could have made a truly great film that was a reflection of a time and place, and only aspects of that remain amongst some of the more overt Roman Porno-y moments mandated by the studio. There are times where the film feels very freewheeling in a 1970's way, but these moments are often suffocated by the need for sex or nudity to keep the studio happy. Sometimes these mix together well, such as when Honda takes Masako around town, Makoto in tow. It’s all about Masako helping to try and get Makoto get over his inability to be intimate with women. There’s a ludicrous absurdity that is often intentional; Masako has her hands down the young man’s trousers obviously trying to arouse him, in the street, on the roof of an apartment store with the obligatory funfair, you name it, it’s going on. There’s a clear streak here of very intentional absurdism – and to an extent it works, but too often the sex undercuts what could have fascinating. True, it does not help that the (I assume) gay (and gay prostitute) Makoto, is a bit of a limp cliche of a character, whereas there is something in the pairing of Masako and Honda that really fires - there’s chemistry here, a tension and a sense of two people genuinely being close without it needing to explain itself. They exist together, though are they a couple or just friends? Explanation would weaken their relationship. There is something refreshing in Honda’s apparent emotional blankness that belies the feelings you feel he has running under the surface. The film is always at its best when they are together, as this is when it feels most "real". 

As the film ends, and Masako and Honda move through early morning Tokyo streets with everyday urban images, it has a magical yet gorgeously ordinary quality to it and is when the two characters come most alive. It’s intriguing how visually the film here is at its very best, the director capturing the simple mechanical opening of shutters, which becomes fascinating; how the two tired people seem at their most present, more so than when Honda is sat at home watching his neighbours have sex, or moments in the soapload bathhouse. This feels like the film the director really wanted to make as it feels the most precise, thought-out and affecting. It provides the greatest sense of time and place, more so than Makoto being tied up and whipped during an S&M art gathering, a gaggle of photographers snapping him during the arty porn exhibitionism session. Ironically this feels quite real and reminded me a bit of 1960s Yoko Ono being filmed on stage as people came up and cut off parts of her clothes. Likely all very relevant then, but dated today. 

Yet just as much as Tanaka likes filming aspects of near magical realism, there are moments of subjective vision, such as Masako imagining stabbing Makoto with a sharpened umbrella. He also uses devices to effectively cut the budget, using an umbrella falling from a building rather than a person. Somehow this is emotionally more disturbing and visually more satisfying too. So there's much to love about Tanaka as a director, yet some of the moments in the bathhouse, and others with Makoto do lessen the film. There’s only so many images of soaped-up breasts being rubbed against someone’s back you can take. That said two of Masako’s friends in the bathhouse have personalities and stories, as do some of the regulars, so we can see how again the film is trying to tell something of a wider story whilst being stymied by a 68-minute runtime. Yet within these stories there are moments of gritty reality, sometimes dishonesty and sometimes tenderness. 

It’s an interesting mix and maybe a film that lives somewhat better in your head after watching it than when on screen. It’s a brave attempt to bring alive and time and place and series of characters. At its best, in those moments of freewheeling glimpses of the everyday, it soars. It just gets wrapped up in the genre the studio rammed it into - left alone and given free reign, it would be fascinating to see what the movie could have been. Not that this is a noble failure - it’s not a full-on success either, but instead a film that feels as if it was reaching for the stars and failing to grasp them, leaving us with a much more interesting, greatly fascinating film than any standard Roman Porno fare. So should you watch Night of the Felines? Yes, you should.