‘Outrage’ opens Friday, January 6th at the Music Box Theater.
Ahh, the Yakuza film…chronicles of the Japanese gangster syndicates, as tried and true a film genre as samurai films or American gangster films. They’re terrific, if squirm-inducing, vehicles for combining showy technical filmmaking and jawdropping depictions of violence with overarching philosophical concepts like honor among thieves and historical allegiances within cultures and families across generations and centuries. Kinji Fukasaku seems to be the pioneer of the modern yakuza film – his postwar-dated epic ‘Battles Without Honor & Humanity,’ from 1972, is his widely-acknowledged masterpiece (Fukasaku went on to do the legendary ‘Battle Royale’ as well – look that baby up for some truly surreal B-grade thrills!). Seijun Suzuki made some eye-popping op-art yakuza thrillers in the sixties, Teruo Ishii and Kiyoshi Kurosawa are also skillful genre directors worth checking out, and the prolific Takeshi Miike made a number of ultraviolent entries as well. Also worth noting are Johnnie To’s Chinese Triad films, which have a lot in common with these films stylistically (‘The Mission,’ ‘Fulltime Killer,’ ‘Election’ and ‘Election 2,’ and ‘Exiled’ are just a few).
Takeshi Kitano is one of Japan’s most successful recent purveyors of the genre: ‘Sonatine,’ ‘Fireworks,’ and ‘Brother’ are notable examples (although he’s also known for far more artful and abstracted projects like ‘Kikujuro,' ‘Dolls,’ and his update of the samurai classic ‘Zatoichi’) and his most recent contribution is the thrillingly efficient Outrage (Autoreiji) (Japan, 2010).
The yakuza tree of allied families, and the vertical hierarchy along that tree, is daunting for Western audiences to follow. In this film, the top family is Sanno-Kai, run by The Chairman (Soichiro Kitamura) and his right-hand, Katô (Tomokazu Miura). There are many families allied to Sanno-Kai, but the one we’re concerned with is Ikemoto’s. The Chairman isn’t happy that Ikemoto (Jun Kunimura) has entered into an alliance with Murase (Renji Ishibashi), an old prison acquaintance to whom he swore an oath of brotherhood. Murase is in the drug trade, and The Chairman isn’t interested in tarnishing his straight-businesses reputation by associating with them. But skimming Murase’s drug profits is a big source of income for Ikemoto. Murase wants to exploit his ties to Ikemoto to gain access to Sanno-Kai; Ikemoto has to string along Murase for maximum profit while deceitfully freezing him out of Sanno-Kai’s interests.
A businessman goes to a nightclub and is fleeced by a few of the cocktail hostesses. Unbeknownst to him, it’s owned by the Murase family. He’s not carrying that much money, but has the money to pay at his nearby office. He invites one of the club bouncers to accompany him. When they arrive at the office, they’re met by six other men – the businessman works for the Ikemoto family. They give the bouncer the money, but they’re clearly insulted. Murase instructs his men to make reparations to the Ikemoto family – some money and the bouncer’s finger. But it’s not enough, and Ikemoto’s main enforcer, Ôtomo (Kitano, billed within his cast as ‘Beat Takeshi’), violently attacks Kimura (Hideo Nakano), Murase’s underboss. This escalating situation is the first of a series of ‘outrages’ that expand across families and lead to further violence – one side creates an ‘outrage,’ the other overreacts, and bodies pile up as family enterprises are betrayed and decimated. And caught in the middle of it all is Ôtomo, who is allied in business with Ikemoto and his underboss, Ozawa (Tetta Sugimoto), but primarily acts as Ikemoto’s enforcer and clean-up man – he’s in charge of all the dirty work, with his lieutenant, Mizuno (Kippei Shiina) and the ruthless business manager Ishihara (Ryo Kase).
There’s a ‘Godfather’-inspired complexity to most of the successful yakuza epics, and ‘Outrage’ is no exception – it’s tough to keep the parade of bosses, underbosses, enforcers, enemies and business associates straight as the film proceeds – but keeping track of all of those people was a chore in ‘The Godfather,’ too, and it’s still a masterpiece. And, actually, from what I’ve read, this is a pretty straightforward and predictable plot for yakuza-film aficionados. I think most American audiences just let the double-and-triple-crosses blur past them from one artfully-shot murder to the next, but there’s some truly compelling structure to the proceedings if you pay real attention.
Filmmakers like Teruo Ishii and Takeshi Miike tend to make extremely kinetic, chaotic, frantic yakuza films. Kitano’s mise-en-scène (the compositions, camera placements, movements, and lighting) is very ordered, very clean and symmetrical, almost elegant; a few shots brought to mind the hard geometry and in-frame invention of Jacques Tati’s ‘Playtime.’ But he’s not shy about serving up strong medicine, either – the tradition of cutting off fingers is frequently observed here, and another scene may keep you out of a dentist’s office for quite a while. There’s smart, minimal, efficient storytelling here – Kitano’s film is a bracing noir-inflected revenge thriller that I’m happy to recommend.
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