Thoughts on Pale Flower

   I watch the Criterion Closet YouTube videos, where guests (usually filmmakers and actors, sometimes musicians, writers, and other celebrities) peruse through the DVD closet of Criterion and pick out movies to take home, explaining their choices and backstories behind their interest in the films. The latest one has Patton Oswalt, and I didn't know that he's a major film nerd, with a lot of interesting taste in old foreign films. One of the films he recommended was Pale Flower, a 1964 Yakuza gangster romance film directed by Masahiro Shinoda. I've never seen any of the old Yakuza b/w films, and based on Oswalt's enthusiastic description of the film, I decided to check it out on Criterion, 

    And it was a great selection! It's a mix of being noir but having a 60s New Wave feel to it. It stars Ryo Ikebe as Muraki, a Yakuza hitman who just got out of prison after serving three years for murder, and gets right back into his gangster scene, finding out how gangs formed alliances and had a truce since he's been away. He returns to the underground gambling world, and meets a beautiful well-off woman named Saeko (Mariko Kaga), who is the only woman gambling in the parlor, and stands out in a pristine, ladylike way. They share a bond of both being attracted to gambling (her because life is boring and predictable) and feeling out of sorts, and begin an affair, him feeling like he can be redeemed through her seeming sweetness. But she's mysterious and has a shady background, with an attraction to drugs, which then only attracts more heat around them through his gangster circles.

    It's got a cool vibe to it, with his noir narration, her glamour, mixing in gangs and drug abuse and being very stylish to watch, with a great score by Toru Takemitsu. There was a subplot I wasn't as into, where he had a girlfriend who had been sexually abused by her dad, and had been waiting for Muraki all the time he was in prison even while casually dating a normal, average guy. Muraki encourages her to forget him and marry the nice guy, but she's still drawn to wanting the sexy gangster. I couldn't get into that subplot as much, and found it kind of boring, just feeling like the main romantic relationship and the Yakuza underworld were enough without bringing some superfluous relationship into the mix. 

    To conclude, I will agree with Oswalt that this film is gorgeous, gorgeous.