‘A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness’ Blu-ray Review: Radiance Films

After being blacklisted by Japan’s film studios in 1967 for—as he himself put it later—making “movies that make no sense and make no cash,” nonconformist director Suzuki Seijun spent a decade confined to creating tv and video initiatives earlier than being allowed to helm one other function. His comeback film, 1977’s A Tale of Sorrow and Disappointment, proved each bit as unusual and singular because the movies that received him shut out of studios within the first place.

Opening as a spoof on the journal business, the movie initially focuses on a golf publication cooking up a PR stunt to coach a younger style mannequin, Reiko (Shiraki Yoko), to play the game simply effectively sufficient to enter a event. To the shock of everybody, she proves to be a pure. She’s such a savant that she suggests a classical oracle, fainting in a sort of ecstasy with every good swing.

Rising victorious from the event, Reiko turns into an enormous star, and the journal and numerous sponsors instantly map out a media saturation marketing campaign that sees her elevated to the life of luxurious but additionally makes her the goal of an obsessive fan, Senboh (Enami Kyôko). When Reiko and her supervisor, Miyake (Harada Yoshio), unintentionally clip the girl one evening whereas dashing in her sports activities automotive, Senboh blackmails the star into making her a confidant.

Senboh’s entrance into the movie shifts the story from a commercialization satire nearer in spirit to Masumura Yasuzo’s Giants and Toys to a darker psychological thriller. At this level, Suzuki lets his maverick aesthetic sense take over to visualise the depths of Senboh’s fame-worshipping insanity and the way in which that it manifests as a want to manage the article of her affection.

A shot of Senboh inside Reiko’s dwelling sees the mannequin in the precise of body, standing on the overlit observe inexperienced constructed into her mansion as if she have been posing for a photoshoot. In the meantime, Senboh sits within the left of the body cloaked in shadow, the room nearly completely bifurcated between the extremes of gentle. It’s a superb Mephistophelian demonstration of the stalker’s evil. Later, after Senboh has put in herself in the home as a everlasting visitor, she sits down for breakfast along with her boring and obedient husband (Koike Asao) in a scene that originally scans as a imaginative and prescient of contented domesticity—till the digital camera tilts right down to see the girl’s reflection in a glass desk that tints her pores and skin a necrotic inexperienced, as if revealing the monster inside.

As Senboh takes up extra and more room in Reiko’s life, she turns into more and more drunk with energy, resulting in absurdist scenes like one by which she invitations a throng of different Reiko obsessives to the star’s dwelling and presides over a grotesque style catwalk with the observe inexperienced as a makeshift runway. For her half, Reiko clearly submits to those humiliations as a result of they’re according to the ways in which Miyake and sponsors exploit her. Maybe essentially the most disturbing suggestion, although, is the diploma to which Senboh and different followers grow to be victims of their very own obsession, each wardens of the cage by which they place the mannequin and fellow prisoners incapable of escaping their very own deluded fantasies.

All of Suzuki’s long-established aesthetic logos are current within the movie: the unusual and surreal visible compositions, the disorienting enhancing that borders on free affiliation, the daring use of shade. However he modulates them away from the anarchic frenzy of his ’60s work and towards a extra outwardly stately tone that finally makes his idiosyncrasies all of the more unusual and unnerving. The director would develop this technique even additional all through his Taisho trilogy within the ’80s, his most commercially profitable works and triumphs of a mature model that sublimated his youthful anarchy right into a extra multifaceted, fastidiously modulated method.

Picture/Sound

Radiance’s switch comes from a high-definition scan of the movie’s destructive supplied by Shochiku that sports activities quite a lot of cases of put on and tear. Small scratches and spots recur all through the movie, and grain may be uneven and overly thick at instances. Nonetheless, the wealthy greens, yellows, and reds of the cinematography pop in all their depth, whereas the expressionistic fluctuations in lighting by no means lead to a hazy or softened picture. The soundtrack consists of little greater than dialogue and the occasional intrusions of the music rating, and these components are effectively balanced to maintain the previous constantly clear.

Extras

On his new commentary monitor, critic Samm Deighan discusses Suzuki Seijun’s profession and time away from studio filmmaking, in addition to aesthetic and thematic by strains that join A Tale of Sorrow and Disappointment to those that Suzuki made earlier than and after. The disc additionally features a new interview with editor Ukai Kunihiko by which he particulars the director’s unorthodox technique of assembling the movie, treating every scene as its personal self-contained brief film versus specializing in the general circulate of the minimize. A booklet incorporates an archival interview with screenwriter Yamatoya Atsushi and an essay by critic/filmmaker Jasper Sharp that covers the movie’s place in Suzuki’s profession and these of some of the director’s collaborators.

Total

Suzuki Seijun’s comeback movie is a key second within the maverick director’s profession, and Radiance’s disc affords a welcome likelihood to judge its delicate ingenuity.