Pale Flower (1964)
Pale Flower is a film by Shinoda Masahiro. Shinoda aside from Teshigahara is my favorite 60s New Wave/ Avant Garde director in terms of style. Working in several genres this was a yakuza film that was the first film of his to really bring him any acclaim. Years later he would jump to period films, keeping the same high contrast style in both Double Suicide and Assassination. This film however is what I feel should be classified as Japanese film noir along with Suzuki Seijun, Nakahiro Ko, and bits of Oshima Nagisa who all exemplified characteristics of high contrast black and white, minimal settings, shadow play, and hard boiled character archetypes that are faithful to the American equivalent…
The story is about an aging yakuza gangster who has just been released from prison after serving time for a yakuza related murder. Back on the prowl he meets an energetic young woman in his gambling spots who simply lives for the life. He becomes her mentor taking her to higher stakes games, while they slowly fall in love. As their addiction not only to gambling but to each other progresses, so do tensions between his and rival yakuza mobs. The ending almost becomes circuital in their destructive relationship.
By all means this is an impressive film well constructed and executed. It is deeply moody supported by a high contrast black and white that shows us a bitter and bleak underworld, with nihilism prevailing as the central theme. And yes it is a yakuza film, and all the genre cliches can be applied. But this is what makes an auteur…an auteur, in that Shinoda is able to take his own style and take a genre and really make it his own. Trained in Japanese theatre with a heavy understanding of culture he would display this most brilliantly later in Double Suicide, juxtaposing bunraku with Japanese cinema. With this Shinoda chose to do a yakuza film because he believed the yakuza world is the only place where the Japanese ceremonial structure is sustained; where an aesthetic response to ceremony is still possible. The overall behavior of the yakuza is very ceremonial as like the samurai characters and culture in films of past…in this respect it also truly avant garde.
Presenting this ceremonial quality, there is a beautiful expansive opening sequence of the gambling tables. What he does in a little over a few minutes lasting through a credit sequence is present to us an atmosphere and tone. Yet the shot compositions all suggest a formality that will characterize the film. This is all done before the film even begins, which is really just effective cinema.
