Escape from Japan (1964)

My first reaction when I saw this movie was that its director, Kuji Yoshida, was pulling a Suzuki by taking an absurd script and filming it as absurdly as possible. However, that does not seem to be the case. Yoshida wrote the script and then walked out of Shochiku reportedly because the studio cut the ending he wanted. So he appears to have been deeply invested in the movie.

Even so, the movie seems out of place and time, a companion piece for Yoshida’s Good for Nothing (made four years earlier) but now appearing when the fad for troubled youth movies had faded and Shochiku’s interest in “new wave” directors had long since ended. It also seems out of place in Yoshida’s work as a whole, for by this date he had met (and married) Mariko Okada. From this point on through the sixties, he would produce his own movies, all of them cool, elegant, slo-o-o-w, Antonioni-esque women’s pictures that eventually got swallowed up by their own artsiness.

Escape gives us the most troubled of all troubled young men in Japanese movies of the era. He is so highly-strung, as played by Yashushi Suzuki, that we begin to wonder if Yoshida ever bothered to tell him he was not actually playing the junkie friend. His over-the-top performance makes Akira in The Warped Ones seem like The Fonz by comparison. We come upon him in the middle of a heist that is about to go wrong, and then follow his attempt to get out of Japan, accompanied by a prostitute (Miyuki Kuwano) he picked up in the Turkish bath where the heist starts. He wants to be a jazz singer, in America no less, and what recognizable plot there is concerns his attempt to get out of the country safely and get to the US.

The Tokyo Olympics lie in the background but do not actually figure in the plot, so if there is social commentary intended, I certainly missed it.

The cool elegance of Good for Nothing is long gone. Yoshida lays on the weird camera angles, with lots of overheads, and jazzy cutting that you would expect from an enfant terrible making his first movie and trying to prove he was a real enfant terrible, and Toru Takemitsu contributes one of his heaviest, most intrusive jazz scores. I’d like to say it was part of the disaffected youth genre, but Suzuki’s performance combined with the “look at me” direction make it all but impossible to work up any sympathy for the characters. Nor does it encourage us to view the character dispassionately or analytically as a social problem that can be solved or that somehow represents some kind of internal rot in the general social system, and his general behavior is so outrageous we find it hard to be even outraged.  If Suzuki is representative of some societal failure, I missed the connection amid the over-acting and over-directing. I have no idea what the ending that Shochiku cut might have been, but there is no sign from the remaining movie that it is any Magnificent Ambersons waiting to be restored and rediscovered.

However, I think it may be the first Japanese movie I’ve seen in which the character actually wants to go to America. The US as a land of promise and opportunity is not a recurrent theme in Japanese movies as it is in European or Latin-American movies; in those few cases in which characters talk about emigration, they aim for Brazil in the decades after the war, Korea, Manchuria, or sometimes China in the thirties. American jazz is often the symbol of youthful rebelliousness or escape from poverty, but the rare musicians portrayed have no plan to cross the ocean to get rich and famous. Considering the wealth flaunted by the Americans during the Occupation and on the continuing bases afterward, and the gangster or industrialist’s use of the American car as proof of their importance, you would think a chance at all that prosperity would be a more common theme. But if it is, I have missed it. The most common goal is to find prosperity or at least financial security, in a new Japan, not to leave for better options elsewhere.

Yoshida’s independent productions would show a sharp change of approach, so much so as to sugggest two completely different writer/directors.