Branded to Kill (1967)
An insane movie for insane people made by an insane master of insanity.
Directed by: Seijun Suzuki
Cinematography by: Kazue Nagatsuka
Country: Japan
Branded to Kill is one of the Crown Jewels of the Japanese New Wave, and in the film Seijun Suzuki creates a reality where chaos is the natural order of things, and logic and purpose become trivial afterthoughts. It’s a sex-and-guns B-movie dialed up to 11 about a man with a fetish for huffing steamed rice attempting to become the top-ranked assassin in Japan, until his plans are thwarted by an unfortunately placed butterfly, and he becomes a plaything for the real number one hit man.
While watching Branded to Kill I found myself constantly asking aloud - with equal parts delight and confusion - “what is happening?”, as my eyes became unblinking orbs and my jaw hung agape at the pure, uncut anarchic madness that is this film; it’s irreverent to the point of nihilism. I truly believe that if The Joker character - as portrayed in The Dark Knight - had decided to test his hand at filmmaking rather than terrorize Gotham, he would have made Branded to Kill, or something akin to it.
Suzuki’s film so unrelentingly spit in the face of the studio system that he was subsequently fired and blacklisted for 10 years, his employers citing that he kept making “movies that make no sense,” information which I find infinitely amusing. Making something so full of nonsense that it gets you not just fired, but blacklisted, sounds like some low-key #lifegoals. And as any lovers-of-nonsense know, haters-of-nonsense just makes nonsense-makers nonsense more nonsense (if you’re keeping count that’s five uses of the word nonsense in one sentence which means the rabbit hole to Wonderland just opened up somewhere in the world).
What stops Branded to Kill from being lumped in with other over-the-top, bewildering exploitation films from around the world is that Seijun Suzuki was an undeniably gifted filmmaker, and even at his most berserk, his randomness showed a level of stylistic vision, and an understanding of form, that most directors never achieve. This combination of master craftsmanship and limit-pushing was completely aligned with his iconoclastic New Wave counterparts such as Shohei Imamura and Nagisa Oshima.
Similar to their New Wave contemporaries from around the world, these three filmmakers despised convention. They were not out to make crowd-pleasing films: they wanted to make art that was radical and subversive. What set these three apart however, and generally the Japanese New Wave as a whole, was their flagrant embrace of taboo. They would drag viewers to the edge of a cliff and toss them into a raging sea of violence, perversion, fetish, and degradation, as they performed a sort of danse macabre from above. They used the technical achievements of Japan’s illustrious cinematic history and morphed it into a warped totem, reflecting how they viewed Japanese society, and honoring its outcasts.
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