Tale of Sorrow / Hishu monogatari (1977)

It took almost twenty years after Giants and Toys in 1958 for Japan to come up with such a jaundiced look at the interweaving of celebrity, advertising, and TV and the personal damage left in their wake as seen in  Tale of Sorrow. Along the way, the movie also throws in a sports guru training a protegee, a twisted love affair, a fair amount of nudity, a hit-and-run case, an imaginary friend, a deranged stalker, and a child who turns killer, all in 90 minutes, so the final result is something of a chaotic mess. However, it also puts Seijun Suzuki in the director’s chair after a decade of blacklisting, and we get to see that his ten years in the wilderness did not in any way tamp down his impishness or his fine disregard for clichéd story lines.

Neither the subtitles nor IMDB credit a screenwriter, who must of course take much of the blame for the mess. Fundamentally, we have two stories crammed into one movie (not in itself unusual for Japanese movies, which have a habit of turning in a different direction partway through the movie). One is absolute cliché: A magazine wants a new female sports star because the previous client, a gymnast, has gotten too demanding. They settle on Reiko, a model who plays golf reasonably well, and decide to make her into a golf champion. Already we are in absurdist territory – golf!! and amateur women’s golf to boot!!!, which must have had an international audience of about seven people in the seventies. Nevertheless, she is put in the hands of Miyake (Yoshio Harada), who hires a retired golf guru, who in turn drives her through endless practice sessions, with rain machines and wind machines, until her hands are bleeding and eventually she is ready for the big tournament. Meanwhile, Miyake has coached her on how to look beautiful, how to faint with exhaustion, etc., so that her come-from-behind victory is even more dramatic. This makes her a star in advertising, especially clothes, and gains her a regular show on TV. This is a very common story line in American movies – underdog comes out of nowhere to win the Big Game or the Championship — but Japan had also been making this kind of story in a different manner with Mushashi Miyamoto as a template and extended to other areas by Kurosawa’s Sanshiro Sugata, so the basic outline was not an imitation of American movies. There is also a considerable amount of absurdist humor as two of the worst golfers in the history of the world plan how to make a golf star in the middle of their round.

Suzuki and his editor (also uncredited) are not much interested in that story, however, and it is told in such elliptical scenes and sudden cuts that we often feel like half of the script was left on the cutting room floor. Their real interest lies in what happens after Reiko becomes famous, when Reiko moves into a new home. A pretty good movie could have been made starting from that point, with her golf and TV stardom simply a given, and with or without Suzuki’s habitual stylings, this half of the movie is pretty solid. A neighbor becomes obsessed with her, calling her at odd times, stalking her public appearances, and eventually faking a hit-and-run accident that gains her access to Reiko’s house and a serious attempt to take over Reiko’s life (except for the golf). The surprise is that this stalker is another woman, Senboh (Kyoko Enami), not the usual man in stalker stories (there is in fact a man always in the background with a bouquet of flowers, but he turns out to be just a fan, not a stalker or a threat). Senboh is already something of an outsider among the wives of her neighborhood and she uses her connection to the woman in the big house to lure them in to visits inside the house and eventually a gigantic party in which they drink all Reiko’s booze and use her putting green for the runway of a fashion show with her clothes. When Reiko returns home at last, she is stripped and beaten by the women while Senboh looks on in all her glory. Eventually, Senboh tells people that Reiko has been sleeping with her husband and then demands that the pair go through with it while she watches, which leads to a genuinely unexpected, off-the-wall climax.

The satire of TV and advertising is not as pointed as we might expect from Suzuki; Reiko just has an afternoon chat show with a small studio audience and it is mostly devoted to fashion.

Reiko and Senboh on the TV set

It is away from the TV satire where we see that the Suzuki of the Jo Shishido years has not gone away. (Shishido even makes a cameo appearance as a cop in a cowboy hat who arrests Miyake for no particular reason: perhaps Shishido just dropped in on the set one day and Suzuki threw in this pointless scene to get him in front of the camera.) We have the strange, elliptical cutting, the sudden lurch from absolute realism to absolute studio fakery without any attempt to disguise it. Aside from Enami’s warped characterization, the real hero of the movie is the Art Director / Production Designer (also uncredited), who has provided Suzuki with some of the most peculiar interiors ever seen on film. Her house looks like Jacques Tati designed it for a parody of modernism, with implausible furnishings and her brother’s room on the inside a yellow upstairs box that can be reached only by a rope ladder, a bedroom with a see-through curtain, and a shower with no door. The magazine boss’s office is all stainless steel. Many of the walls of other scenes are the old Nikkatsu blank grey, sometimes washed with intense colored lights.  Instead of the camera dollying away from the scene, characters are pulled out of the shot to the side on their own dolly. The car is sometimes in traffic, sometimes in front of a projection screen, and sometimes just spotlighted in the studio on a white floor, surrounded by darkness. It is a feast of visual non-sequiturs.

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There is often the feeling in Suzuki’s last movies in the sixties that he actually hated the scripts handed to him and that he and his production team just did whatever came to mind not in order to make them better but to just make them different. That same feeling creeps through here. The odd visuals don’t increase the drama or the satire, they are just thrown in. Some of the sections of the movie are more intentionally confusing than Tokyo Drifter or Branded to Kill, which is saying something. Why Shochiku of all studios should have decided to offer him a job is unknown, but they were not happy with the result and he went back into exile until he scraped together independent money for Zigeunerweisen three years later.