Rediscover is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that have flown under the radar and now deserve a second look.The story behind Tokyo Drifter is almost as entertaining as the film itself and certainly more easily followed. Seijun Suzuki’s time at legendary Japanese studio Nikkatsu was, to put it mildly, contentious. Constantly butting heads with the artistically conservative studio head Kyusaku Hori, Suzuki kept responding to warnings to make more straightforward films with increasingly surreal stylistic smorgasbords. By the time of Tokyo Drifter, Suzuki’s antepenultimate film for Nikkatsu, Hori had slashed Suzuki’s budget to ribbons in the hopes of forcing the director to finally play ball. Or maybe the executive just needed the extra cash to hire a specialist to monitor his heart rate over the whole situation.
Naturally, Suzuki treated the punishment as a challenge, and Tokyo Drifter emerged so resolutely weird it’s less shocking that Hori would fire the cult filmmaker two films later than it is he didn’t fire the director on the spot. Soaked in color and assembled erratically, Tokyo Drifter does the opposite of Hori’s intended goal by using the reduced money to cut out anything that might make the movie coherent. All that’s left is the style.
Opening with blown-out black and white shots that make Yoshishige Yoshida’s nuclear explosion lighting from Eros + Massacre look murky by comparison, Tokyo Drifter soon morphs into a neon phantasmagoria. Muzzle flashes burst in hot pink sparks, a minimalist nightclub lies static in suffocating yellow and a youth-filled jazz dive pops in exciting purple. Constantly changing lighting setups share only the trait of being universally overlit, while arrhythmic editing and camera placement incessantly leap around action, creating disorienting but propulsive momentum.
Take, for instance, a showdown between Tetsu (Tetsuya Watari) and the rival Otsuka clan’s best assassin, Tatsu the Viper (Tamio Kawaji). The two draw their guns on railroad tracks in the snow as a train approaches, but the next thing we see is Tetsu stumbling away. Not until a handless, hyperventilating Viper shows up later do we get any kind of idea what happened, though the sight of the maimed killer is so odd it only raises more questions. Earlier, Suzuki frames the death of a moll from a stray bullet with a straight-down ceiling view in extreme long shot, cutting to her flopped corpse along a horizontal axis that reveals streaks of day-glo red blotting out the sky. These manic touches obliterate narrative flow, but it’s more entertaining to just sit back and admire what Suzuki, cinematographer Shigeyoshi Mine and art director Takeo Kimura threw together.
All of this is not to say that Suzuki’s film isn’t bursting with ideas. A yakuza film about a loyal hood, Tetsu, trying to serve his boss after the leader goes legit. For all the rampant pandemonium of the film’s design, it presents the yakuza archetypes with considered logic, which just so happens to expose the lunacy of those genre tropes. Tetsu’s unquestioning loyalty is presented not as the heir to Bushido honor but a thuggish farce, an ignorant fealty to be used and abused by those to whom it is given. Even the boss tries to get some cold, unromantic truth into Tetsu early on, scoffing at his dismissed servant’s refusal of severance payment with, “Don’t be stupid. You’ll need money wherever you go.”
Tokyo Drifter also serves as something of an acid Western, with more than a few nods, whether intentional or not, to Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar. Tetsu is the singing cowboy drifter, and Chiharu’s club is not altogether unlike Vienna’s parlor. Suzuki gleefully spoofs the Western genres in an uproarious, characteristically out-of-nowhere scene where patrons at a retro saloon get into an epic bar brawl with stationed U.S. Navy men. It’s such a ludicrous travesty of a scene that one cannot help but wonder if Mel Brooks watched it before he made his own deconstructive, fourth-wall breaking fight in Blazing Saddles.
Donald Richie described the motivating factor of the Tokyo Drifter’s construction as “delight in mayhem,” which neatly summarizes Suzuki’s approach. But it too casually ignores the slyness of Suzuki’s surrealist mash-up of genres and styles into a hyperkinetic take on contemporary European avant-garde. Suzuki bends Tetsu into a simultaneous embodiment and mockery of Antonioni-esque modern alienation, reframing the drifter’s “escape” from one stultifying system into a literal-minded, ironic twist on the idea of “loyal to no one.” The director also takes liberally from Godard, be it jump cuts prompted by necessity, pop art-infused color fantasias or Brechtian genre critiques. There’s a lot to unpack in Suzuki’s jazzy un-thriller; that it should be so endlessly watchable only makes the task easier.
