Aka - Jînzu burûsu:
Asu naki buraiha
It opens with a theme song that I believe is sung by Meiko Kaji who co-stars
in the film. She plays Hijiriko who works in a swingers club and as the men
and women cavort in the back with flashes of nudity, she stares ahead ignoring
all that, her profile in studied indifference as she puffs on her cigarette.
One customer asks her to join them and she gives him a wilting fuck you look.
She has had enough and leaves stealing a car of a customer. She doesn't get
far before she crashes into another car. That Jiro (Tsunehiko Watase) is
driving. He has just helped kill a man and dug his grave before it becomes
obvious to him that he is about to share that grave. He takes the 5 million
yen they were paid for the job and goes on the run. He needs it to pay his
sister who tells him that to pay her debt off she will have to go work as
a prostitute in Osaka. Some perverse fate brings these two losers filled
with ennui and nihilism together just when they needed to be. They go on
the run together - him to escape being killed, her to escape her life. The
gang keeps looking for them.
Nothing goes right for them. Bad decisions and bad luck follows them like
a stalking ghost. It initially is rather comical as this duo keeps fucking
up, but then as the film goes along it gets more and more violent till it
can't help but remind one of Bonnie and Clyde. Meiko is stunning and stylish
as she first has a hat that she pulls down over her face like Bogart in a
noir and then breathtakingly buys a black leather outfit that brings on memories
of her other films. This was made after most of her classic films - the Stray
Cat Rock series, the two Wandering Ginza films, the Female Prisoner series
and the first of the Lady Snowblood films with the second coming in this
same year. This can't be ranked up there with those.
Meiko had to some degree inherited the female action mantle from Junko Fuji
who was retiring and certainly would not have taken the roles that Meiko
did. The days of the classic Ninkyo Eiga films that Junko Fuji starred in
with astonishing grace were coming to an end and something much more graphic,
gritty and sexual were in vogue. Pinky violence though Meiko kept her distance
from most of the scurrilous aspects of those films. All she needed was the
stare, the look and her stylish clothes. She barely says anything in the
film, but she doesn't need to. This was nearly her final film in the genre
as she moved on to more mainstream films. But she left quite a trail of classic
films behind her. There was really nothing like them anywhere in the world
at that point. The film has its charms as this pair go from one situation
to another - always managing to escape - but they seem unaware or uncaring
that fate has a card up its sleeve as they rob a Yakuza gambling parlor,
shoot up a police car and rob a gas station.
