Tattooed Life

A new Seijun Suzuki release is always something to be celebrated and it’s been a while since we’ve had one. It's fair to say then that I was excited to hear about his 1965 film, Tattooed Life, getting the Radiance treatment.  

In the first year of the Showa era, a small-time yakuza, Tetsu (Hideki Takahashi), takes money to kill an opposing boss to fund his younger brother, Kenji’s (Kotobuki Hananomoto), artistic endeavours, only for his own clan to double cross him. Tetsu survives but Kenji becomes implicated in his crimes and they initially  plan to flee to Manchuria, only to fail to find passage and having to get by through working in construction.  Here the brothers find themselves falling for two sisters while both the law and local yakuza are at their heels.

Considering the year of its creation you have to remember this is Seijun Suzuki in Nikkatsu pot-boiler mode, making films at speed and not really intended by the studio for posterity. That said, some of the claims that Nikkatsu pot-boilers of the period were intended only for a local audience seem to be slightly untrue, John Woo being influenced by Suzuki's films as they made their way to Hong Kong in the 60’s but nevertheless being treated like early silent films: films to be made quickly, to make money, but where many who created them imbued the films with creativity and this is of course where Suzuki is so celebrated for his 60’s output, but also where he got into trouble. For this reason the plot is pure genre tropes yet this does not mean the film is dull by any means.  

Almost immediately I was put in mind of Suzuki’s 1980 Zigeunerweisen. On one level this is because of the setting. Zigeunerweisen, being the first part of his Taisho trilogy, means that visually much of the dress and sets in Tattooed Life are influenced by the Taisho era: the mixture of traditional and Western influences. Also, an early character we meet, a chancer who rips off the two brothers, felt like he belonged to the roguish elements of Suzuki’s later film. Add to this the younger brother’s artistic obsessions which hint at the final Taisho film, Yumeji. Kenji is very much of the sensual-artistic mode – more on this later.  

Though Tattooed Life hints at his later work, the film is understandably very much a part of his 1960’s approach that strains against genre conventions, especially Suzuki’s trademark elliptical approach to editing. He frequently removes those connecting scenes and images, similar to Branded to Kill in particular, and this as always has two impacts; firstly it keeps the viewer on their toes, always having to build narrative connections and secondly, ensures the film’s pace never flags, with a brisk 87-minute runtime.

Sometimes the editing also has additional impact and again I’ll touch on this later in context. Suzuki has some of the challenges he often faces in this part of his career, it’s fair to say that the lead, Hideki Takahashi as Tetsu, lends himself towards the "chewing of the scenery" method of acting. He’s not excessively over the top but he’s not subtle, and not as effective as he arguably is in Suzuki’s other film, Fighting Elegy (which contains one of Suzuki’s most singularly beautiful shots of that period of his work), where a more out-going performance is necessary. That said the characterisation in the film is surprising and it’s worth delving into this in some depth. And sorry, yes, I will.   

Much of the emotional and narrative core of the film is based around the characters. Some of this is standard in part but engaging, such as the workers at the construction site where the brothers end up, which is a rag tag body of men, all building a tunnel for the boss, Yuzo, who is surprisingly not a Yakuza but an honest man. Here there are some stock characters, the incompetent gambler and the stuffy, venal clerk. The group of men in general are entertaining but where the film fascinates is with the nuance of the emotional connections between the two brothers and two sisters, Masayo (Hiroko Ito) to the artistic Kenji and Midori (Masako Izumi) with the yakuza, Tetsu.  

Kenji, being the sensitive artist, first sees Masayo and is entranced. Has he fallen in love? Is this the artist’s muse? At first we do not know but as the brothers find work, Kenji finds Masayo there and Kenji is clear: he wants to sculpt Masayo, who also happens to be the boss, Yuzo’s, wife.  Their meeting is fascinating for its openness and its curious emotional delicacy, Kenji asks to see Masayo naked, just once, to allow him to sculpt her. A bold, nigh shocking request from a stranger. What you suspect is a scene intended to be genre titillation instead becomes something far more subtly emotive and startling, as Masayo responds that she is only naked while bathing; seeing her respond in such a manner, and the performance by Ito, is remarkably sensual because you see detect her inner emotional workings, as we do Kenji. The film then makes it richer, as we move into Masayo at home, thinking of Kenji and then kissed by her husband. But here it’s classic Suzuki, where he moves us from a domestic scene to Masayo seeming to be violently snogged by her husband, without anything between, the film cuts suddenly, leaving us almost shocked and doubtful of Yuzo’s character.

And so we might expect this to play out in the usual way but it doesn’t. Yuzo is aware of Kenji’s feelings and also those of his wife; Masayo seems also torn between Kenji and her husband, as if she loves them both on different levels and for different reasons. Yuzo, equally, is a surprise because you assume he will be a two-dimensional trope of nothingness, a jealous husband who only wants to sack or attack or kill or otherwise just get the bloody hell rid of Kenji, but he is not. He even protects and helps the two brothers. It’s a surprising and refreshing twist and that sophistication of emotion arguably places Yuzo above Kenji, who cannot see beyond the sensual, beyond himself and potentially the harm he may cause. When later in the film he says he wants to see Masayo once more or die, he means it, but can only see his own self, his own emotions, his own desire and perhaps his own art, whereas others are pragmatic and realistic, reasonable and arguably, humane.

This is all then paralleled with Midori and Tetsu; here though it's Midori doing the chasing, whereas Tetsu is always cognisant of the law and the yakuza at his back. Where Kenji sees only his own feelings, Tetsu tries to protect Midori’s, not wanting her to become embroiled in a life potentially without much future. As such Tetsu is the brother that elicits most empathy, rather than the sensual Kenji, who is lost to his own emotions. Unusually Tetsu recognises he would be happy with a normal life and is most suited to living an everyday existence. In some ways Kenji is like the yakuza who seeks death because he often fails to see beyond his own emotions, whereas Tetsu has the ability to change, only his past is forever holding him back.

If much of the narrative follows these emotional arcs, and Suzuki keeps them always engaging, often surprising, where Tattooed Life comes alive, and is most celebrated, is its ending. Prefiguring formalised aspects of his much later Pistol Opera (2001), the use of the camera under the floor purely for dramatic effect that he would reuse 1960’s disco style in Tokyo Drifter (1966), and the colour coding of scenes from his 1964 Gate of Flesh, Suzuki presents us with a barnstorming finale, and merges colour, image and editing to stunning effect. It’s one of those scenes that it is best not to even to try and explain or describe because the best way to approach it is to let it strike you as Tetsu is forced to do battle with those aligned against him and his new-found friends. It's one of his best sequences he has ever shot and maximises the use of colour for emotional and visual impact.

As mentioned, like many earlier Suzuki films, the pot boiler elements are what he needs to overcome and he smothers those aspects that could be tedious or else makes them almost downright confusing, like the visual sub-plot about red patent shoes worn by a policeman and then by someone else. Why? No real reason except to give visual impact, a bit like how in his 1964 The Flower and the Angry Waves one character seems to wear the cape and floppy hat similar to Louis Feuillade’s Judex (I have a wild theory about this that I think is true but would take too long to explain here). The intrusion of the yakuza and others are by the numbers, but Suzuki never gets bogged down in this, though occasionally there are aspects best not thought about too deeply, especially with the film’s other unique aspects.

Overall this is not quite Suzuki at his peak if only because it hasn’t the genre iconoclasm of Branded to Kill or the creative control of his later Taisho trilogy or even Pistol Opera or Princess Raccoon, and sometimes the narrative is a bit jarring, not from the construction of the film but the script. Yet the emotional connections between the two brothers, sisters and even the boss are so much richer than you could hope to expect and that ending... Suzuki shows us how a creative force can take what could otherwise have been a very conventional film and make it startling visual and emotionally engaging.