As the recently paroled gangster Muraki in Masahiro Shinoda’s Pale Flower, Ryo Ikebe is practically the definition of cool. He looks like Elvis playing James Dean, or James Dean playing Elvis. In a plaid suit.
More to the point, he’s a disaffected loner, an outcast even when at home among his own kind. This is 1964 Japan after all, where pop culture and nihilism went hand in hand. In the 1960s, youth culture the world over was cranking out stories of alienation and anti-establishmentarianist angst. But Japan had specialized in nihilistic heroes for hundreds of years.
The classic Japanese nihilist is a guy who can no longer abide the stupid rules of his surroundings because he knows better than everyone else–put someone like that in a rigidly socialized setting like Japan and he’s bound to be doomed. In this case, Muraki is a world-weary figure who has started to recognize the pointless self-delusions that dominate the world of the yakuza.
He’s fresh out of prison for killing a rival gangster. That’s right: all he did was get rid of another crook like himself. Not the sort of crime that the rest of the world would care about one way or the other. And he’s got data to back that up: he can see with his own eyes how the world now, after his crime and punishment have taken place, is in no way different than before. Not even his fellow yakuza care. The rival gang whom he had been sent to attack has now forged a truce with his own–like rival businesses undertaking a friendly merger.
In a world where even murder has lost any meaning or significance, it’s hard to work up much emotion about anything anymore. Muraki seeks thrills in secret gambling dens, and it is there that he meets a fellow traveler, another lost soul hungry for something more than life seems willing to give.
She’s the “pale flower” of the title. Her name is Saeko, and she’s played by the teenage ingenue Mariko Kaga. The film pointedly denies us any tangible information about who she is, but we can describe her this way: the yakuza bosses luxuriate in an office decorated by a reproduction of the Mona Lisa. They’ve got a replica; Muraki’s got the real thing, every bit as beautiful and enigmatic. And about as lively as a painting, at that.
She needs Muraki’s help to get into the most exclusive clubs, where she hopes to up the ante. She doesn’t much care if she wins or loses–any good gambler will do their share of both. She just wants to gamble for the highest stakes she can find. Maybe if she pushes the risks high enough, she’ll start to feel something.
It’s an empty dream, though. Simply wagering money isn’t enough to kindle her dormant senses. So she looks to put even more at risk–gambling with her own health and sanity, or the lives of others. Anything for a thrill.
Kaga was just nineteen when she made this film. Ikebe was forty five (but doesn’t look it). The age difference between them is barely perceptible, in a relationship so intense that it must rank as one of the great romances in all Japanese cinema. It is not, strictly speaking, a romance, though. Despite the fact that Saeko and Muraki end up naked in bed together at one point, theirs is a chaste relationship–they never even really touch each other (so what are they doing in bed, you ask? Go watch the movie and see for yourself).
Theirs is a passionate connection, if an unconventional one. They don’t need traditional romance or physical attraction when they’ve got something deeper–soul mates bonded in a shared sense of existential boredom.
This kind of thing was the bread and butter of writer Shintaro Ishihara, one of the leading lights of the so-called “Sun Tribe.”. As the creator of such breakthrough hits as Crazed Fruit, Ishihara made his name as the voice of a disaffected generation, railing against contemporary Japanese society. Screenwriter Ataru Baba took Ishihara’s story and turned it into a carefully plotted yakuza thriller, about a gangster caught in a loop, cycling between meaningless murders and their pointless consequences. Baba’s script could have made for a fine film–we’ll never know, because director Masahiro Shinoda merely took Baba’s writing as a recommendation, and went off in his own direction.
Baba took the finished film as a personal insult. He protested that Shinoda had effectively buried his story under so much ostentatious stylization that his own contribution was all but eliminated.
A case in point: one of the signature scenes from the film finds Muraki and Saeko in a secret club, surrounded by wizened figures of the Japanese underground. These men are Powerful, with a capital P, so powerful they barely need to move to ooze intimidation. They seem for the all the world like statues. The game in question is not played with cards, but with tiles–and the motionless men clack these tiles together in their hands, creating a cacophony that sounds like an angry swarm of insects. This scene has is ripe with anxious energy, yet the characters within it are not even really doing anything at all, and the significance of the scene is entirely obscure. It is dramatic tension created out of thin air and used for no purpose.
A scene like this isn’t about story so much as it is about character–and it isn’t about character so much as it is about atmosphere.
Some audiences found this intoxicating–others were left cold (and the divide between the two responses had a lot to do with age, shall we say).
It was not so much unlike what Sergio Leone was doing in Italy at around the same time. Both filmmakers attenuated their stories while prioritizing cinematic style for its own sake, in films populated by characters so cool they could be used to refrigerate meat. You don’t watch movie like this, you absorb them. This was Baba’s complaint. It was also what made Shinoda’s film so enjoyable.
Shinoda had been working at Shochiku since 1953, toiling in the unglamorous role of assistant director. He was aiding some venerable filmmakers, but filmmakers whose best days were behind them and whose current output was routine. Shinoda was so disillusioned with this life he almost quit the movie business altogether. Meanwhile, his friend Nagisa Oshima was dealing with the same sense of disappointment by galvanizing a movement.
“We were trying to figure out what our current generation was, and how not to learn the way of the studio,” Shinoda described it later. The result would be the Japanese New Wave, but Shinoda’s role as a New Wave mainstay was not immediate. In response to Oshima’s inspiration example, Shinoda hastily made a New Wave-ish film of his own—which was an instant box office flop, followed by a decade of half-steps and experimental misfires.
Then, in 1964, he finally nailed it.
Pale Flower was his third stab at making a yakuza film, and the one that finally “clicked.”. The actual Japanese title (Kawaita Hana) translates more accurately as “Withered Flower,” which has a wholly different connotation. “Pale Flower” seems a description of Saeko, but a “Withered Flower “may refer more to the pallid farce of yakuza life.
Western gangster films of the same era tended to use gangsters as metaphors for rebellion, freedom, and defiance. The yakuza of Shinoda’s film are as hemmed in by social rules as the “decent” society they continually refer to. Being a gangster in this film is nothing liberating, it’s as soul-crushing as any salaryman gig.
Shinoda explained that it was the ritual of yakuza life that attracted him–the opportunity to illustrate it’s peculiar ceremonies and attributes. In short, he thought it was all about the atmosphere.
The executives at Shochiku were not entirely sure what to do with this thing. On the one hand, Shinoda has fashioned a film that would stand as a landmark of it’s genre, a beacon of inspiration for generations of filmmakers to follow. Movies like that don’t come along every day. But on the other hand, it was an unusual work that dealt too frankly with controversial subjects–its depiction of drug use, sexual promiscuity, and altogether too-explicit depictions of gambling made it a target for censors. The studio sat on it for the better part of a year before nervously issuing it to theaters.
In the interim, Shinoda had taken to heart that he was a singular artist of rising prominence, with his finger securely on the pulse of the current generation, and if he wished to pursue the promise of that talent he would need to part company with the sticks-in-the-mud that comprised Shochiku. He left to become an independent director.
Like a fine wine, Pale Flower is deeply of its place and time, a distillation of a singular moment in time and space, but one that improves with age and exports well. It is an unfiltered dose of 1964 Japan, and yet also as fresh today as the day it was made.