There exist many contesting readings of yakuza films—Japanese gangster films—and critics’ opinions vary from the dismissive to the ecstatic, especially in the USA and France. To many, yakuza film still remains a disreputable genre, but I suggest that at this year’s BFI Southbank Japanese Gems retrospective, Seijun Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter stands out.

Made in 1966, the film has stood the test of time and remains fascinating in its form and level of entertainment. It has a classic yakuza plo: a young Tokyo gangster, Tetsu ‘The Phoenix’ Honda, belongs to no gang after his boss, Kurata, has gone straight. A rival yakuza clan boss responds to his refusal to join his gang by sending a hitman to kill him. With the help of an old friend, Tetsu evades the hitman and flees to Northern Japan, but is then betrayed by Kurata. So he returns to Tokyo to seek his revenge.

Still frame of Seijun Suzuki’s 1966 film Tokyo Drifter

Suzuki romanticises Tokyo’s low life, making role models of ‘chivalrous outlaws’ who have old-fashioned ideas about women and honour. Criminals are turned into heroes who believe in traditional samurai values of courage, honour and loyalty but live their lives in conflict with the rest of society, amid violence, suicide and love. Tetsu himself is a typical yakuza movie character: a lonely drifter, who, like a hero from a classic western, abandons his woman because “a drifter does not need a woman”.

But unlike many films of this genre, Tokyo Drifter is experimental in form. With startling collage-like imagery and a lack of narrative coherence, the backdrop for gang fights is Tokyo’s 1960s go-go excess, with touches of Pop Art, demonstrating the influence of Western culture on Japan. The film’s coolness and visual flair can also be credited to Suzuki’s impressive sense of style, which makes the film a true guilty pleasure. Suzuki once stated: “The hero has to look stylish. If he dresses like a bum, he is not a hero anymore”, and Tetsu’s sky-blue suit adds to his gangster panache (not to mention his girlfriend’s startling outfits and the numerous close-ups of Otsuka’s sunglasses). Suzuki also experiments with colour: the film opens with a black-and-white sequence, in which a bloodied hero finds a toy gun that changes into a saturated red before we suddenly find ourselves in a busy, neon-soaked Tokyo.

At times, Tokyo Drifter feels like a true art movie. With a series of disconnected shots, narrative and spatial disorientation, abstraction and his very expressive use of colour, Suzuki is often discussed in relation to Godard. But to me his films have a more revealing relationship to Fassbinder’s early masterpieces, such as Love is Colder Than Death (1969) or The American Soldier (1970), in which the actors play their roles in a rather cold and detached manner. Jean-Pierre Melville’s contemporary gangster masterpiece Le Samurai (1967) also comes to mind, but his approach is much more minimalist: monochromatic mise-en-scene and continuous shots, while Suzuki uses various camera angles and brutal edits. Making Tokyo Drifter in this way resulted in the director’s long-lasting conflict with his studio, but by reinventing the genre’s conventions and subverting the rules of the studio system, Suzuki went on to establish himself as one of the greatest mavericks in cinema history.

What is particularly fascinating about Tokyo Drifter is the director’s move towards mockery of a genre which was highly regarded in Japan. Its plot is romantic and lyrical, but is also injected with a sense of nihilism, whereby violence is seen as no worse a way to solve problems than any other. It is much lighter in tone that Suzuki’s earlier Life of a Tattooed Man (1965), for example. In Tokyo Drifter, Suzuki’s take on the traditional theme of a lonely hero is rather surreal and grotesque. Scenes such as the one in which two different gangs fight and demolish a bar are filmed in a highly comical manner and, at times, the film has the feeling of a spoof. It is also highly self-consciousness, such as when Tetsu sings the film’s very catchy theme music to the camera.

Seijun Suzuki’s career has been an influence on many contemporary directors, such as Quentin Tarantino and Jim Jarmusch (who dedicated Ghost Dog to him), but for all its artistic qualities, Tokyo Drifter remains highly entertaining. As an introduction to yakuza films, you won’t do any better than this.

Kamila Kuc
Contributing Writer

© 2008 ArtsEditor.com

In its best moments, the new production of The Chalk Garden at the Donmar Warehouse discloses the true nature of Enid Bagnold’s play: at its heart of hearts, it is nothing but a farce.

The play is set in the Victorian era, and that epoch provides not only the subject matter but also the aesthetic essence of the performance. But what a violation it is of the Donmar’s studio space to thrust into it a perfectly conventional stage cluttered with country house bric-a-brac, of which only a fraction is actually needed. I am not against naturalism per se—even if there is too much of it on the British stage at the moment—but director Michael Grandage’s illusion of the fourth wall is misplaced in the Donmar, whose architecture should encourage more experiment with theatrical forms.

Margaret Tyzack (Mrs St Maugham) in the Chalk Garden at the Donmar Warehouse through August 2nd. Photograph by Manuel Harlan

Meanwhile, the production only rarely lets the audience see beyond superficial impressions. The problem clearly lies in the script. Teenage girl Laurel (Felicity Jones) is raised by a grandmother who encourages her flights of fantasy and whimsical behaviour as laudably unconventional—and the story of abuse through which she processes her abandonment by her mother puts her, true or false, centre-stage. Nonetheless, the full psychological potential of this traumatic past remains unrealised. Instead, Bagnold substitutes weak metaphor for meaning, making the eponymous chalk garden stand for Laurel’s barren upbringing. None of this was original even in 1955, when the play was written, and the tropes operate on a ridiculously simple level of one-to-one equivalence.

The Chalk Garden does not have the strength and texture of a tragedy, or even of realistic psychodrama. Grandage must have partially recognised this since the actors perform their roles in the emotionally heightened manner of a farce. This is fair enough for Laura, for whom such exaggeration is part of her nature and of the game she is playing—but it grates with the other characters. Nor does the director take his instincts to their logical conclusion and stage the play as an out-and-out comedy of hilariously unbelievable characters. Instead, he insists upon bringing out depths the play simply does not possess.

Not only are its tragic elements hopelessly underdeveloped, Bagnold also gives Penelope Wilton’s Miss Madrigal—who is engaged by Laurel’s grandmother as company for the girl—an air of mystery which, though central to the play, can be penetrated from the very beginning. Even worse, when the secret-that-never-was is finally to be revealed, Bagnold digs deep into Agatha Christie’s bag of tricks and comes up with one of the oldest devices in the business. Nor are the emotional and psychological effects of the secret properly developed; only the fact that Laurel finally leaves her grandmother to live with her mother hints at change in the protagonist’s emotional life.

With such a weak plot, coupled with the director’s misguided attempts to take it seriously, the actors were left stranded. Overall, The Chalk Garden is nothing more than a vaguely amusing but meaningless relic of the past, with nostalgia the only scant justification for its revival.

Jens Peters
Contributing Writer

© 2008 ArtsEditor.com

In their vivid re-imagining of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Cheek by Jowl create a world in which the profound and the absurd sit side by side, where tragedy follows comedy, and where lovers and warriors converse with rubber-gloved cleaning ladies. It is strange, surprising, cynical—and almost impossible to ignore.

After seven years of siege, the Greeks and Trojans, fighting for possession of Helen (Marianne Oldham, ethereally beautiful in a floor-length wedding dress), are at stalemate. With the Greeks’ best man, Achilles, refusing to fight, there can be no hope of progress while the Trojan prince Hector lives. Against this backdrop, and under the watchful eye of Pandarus (a creepily avuncular David Collings), Troilus, a young prince of Troy, and Cressida, the daughter of a traitor, meet and pledge themselves to each other in the time-honoured fashion of tragic lovers.

Alex Waldmann as Troilus in Cheek by Jowl’s production of Troilus and Cressida at the Barbican Centre theatre through June 14. Photo by Keith Pattison

The stage traverses the width of the theatre, canvas strips sloping at one end to evoke the tents of the Greek camp and at the other end hanging straight: the towers of Ilium. The costumes are modern—the Trojans stylish in crisp white suits, the Greeks a thuggish rabble in mismatched uniforms, both sporting armour resembling cricket pads—but the weapons are ancient: short swords and dented shields. The audience, in rows of tiered seats facing each other across the stage, might well feel as though they are witnessing a sporting event as the characters spar—verbally and physically—back and forth across the stage. In this never-world, Troilus and Cressida explores themes that speak to audiences even today, especially the play’s stance on the futility of war and the characters’ obsession with personal image (Oliver Coleman’s Paris dons armour only for a glamorous photo shoot).

Troilus and Cressida is a play of far more parts than the eponymous star-crossed lovers. By turns comic and tragic, love and lust—both heterosexual and homosexual—play their part alongside war, honour and pride. Indeed, the play’s epic scale and huge number of characters means that Alex Waldmann’s Troilus and Lucy Briggs-Owen’s Cressida rather fade into the background. I heard one member of the audience complain that they were too young, but, while it is true they are like schoolchildren, how else could they be depicted when they embark on such an obviously doomed relationship after such a bewilderingly brief encounter?

In any case, it makes little sense to pick out any one character or storyline from such a strongly ensemblic piece. As Hector, David Caves is certainly noble, but there is also a clearly foolish streak to his character. Ryan Kiggell’s Ulysses is a blustering statesman rather than a warrior, but his apparent nervousness belies a twisted intellect and hints of homosexuality. Richard Cant (apparently having the time of his life in a standout performance), plays Thersites, the Greek fool, like Lily Savage crossed with a cleaning lady, bitter and bitchy. In one gleefully eccentric scene, he turns cabaret singer and entertains the troops in a little black dress and blonde wig. This is not Shakespeare for purists, but its strong acting and striking presentation demand to be seen.

Francesca Paterson
Contributing Writer

© 2008 ArtsEditor.com

A black PVC shutter whirrs open to reveal a personable young man holding a tray of black champagne. Small clusters of bulbous, stalacmite-like lights, with liberal helpings of black paint poured over them, grow up from a floor adorned with rather beautiful black, graphic carpet tiles, inspired by the geometry and intricacies of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes.

Such combinations of elements produce an almost dreamlike effect—something young French artist Loris Gréaud did to spectacular effect in his recent major solo work at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Cellar Door (a phrase whose unremarkable constituent words, J.R.R. Tolkien noted, gave rise to a peculiarly euphonious phrase in combination) is a continuation of that show, and you can’t fault Gréaud’s endeavour and almost scientific approach to producing thought-provoking artwork.

(detail) Loris Gréaud, Cellar Door, Spore Speakers, 2008, speakers, lights, fiberglass, paint; Developed by Vincent Névot; Courtesy the artist and Yvon Lambert, Paris and New York; Photograph by Steve White; Installation included in the exhibit Loris Gréaud: Cellar Door (Once is Always Twice) at the ICA, London.

The walls of Gréaud’s rather subterranean-feeling chamber also bear a black blueprint (if there can be such a thing) of an ambitious project he is bringing to fruition on the outskirts of Paris. In a rather Utopian artistic vision, and in a nod to the vision of Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus, Gréaud is building his own multifaceted studio environment, to continually push the boundaries of his own very high standards.

After looking around the first chamber, another shutter whirs upwards and you are confronted by another room. It is very nearly identical, and I don’t know whether it is the rather agreeable black champers—offered, perhaps, to lure the Marilyn Mansons of this world into the exhibition—but there appears to be an identical waiter offering me another glass. By this stage I have also become fully aware of loud orchestral music emanating from a speaker in one of the larger stalactites: a libretto created by Gréaud and several musical collaborators.

Reality’s edges become even more blurred when the third PVC shutter rolls up only to reveal another identical layout and—guess what?—another identical waiter. It is playful and funny but also disconcerting, and, in a rather ordinary way, thrilling.

As a surreal footnote, a sweetie dispenser stands anonymously in the cafeteria. The twist is that in exchange for your handful of silver, you get a handful of sweets with no flavour whatsoever; eaters are supposed to project their own flavours onto them. Cellar Door (Once is Always Twice) runs through the 22nd of June at the ICA and, in more ways than one, it won’t leave a bad taste.

Toby Messer
Contributing Writer

© 2008 ArtsEditor.com