Youth of the Beast

It could be a quirk of the English subtitles stamped on the viewed video but, at one point in director Seijun Suzuki's Youth of the Beast (and following a lengthy cab ride in which Joe Shishido's ex-cop Mizuno lays out his suspicions about a blackmail ring to a former colleague), our hero leaps from the still moving vehicle with an instruction to the driver to take 'him' home. We presume Mizuno means the policeman that he has just spent the last couple of minutes outlining a conspiracy to. However, as Suzuki and cinematographer Kazue Nagatsuka's jittery camera bounces around, facing into the back seat of the taxi, we notice - through the rear window - that the policeman has already darted out of the car. He silently keeps pace with Mizuno, leaving us behind with the camera, rocking uselessly and forlornly as we recede from this renewed meeting. We have, ever so briefly, been dismissed from the unfolding proceedings. The pervasiveness that we, the audience, enjoy has been thwarted. This sort of textual playfulness is all over Youth of the Beast, a film in which malevolent pimps are transformed into receding optical effects in the mind of despairing junkies or a scene in which an interlude of sadomasochistic foreplay is presented as the swirling eye of a tumultuous dust devil. At the film's outset, Joe Shishido's Mizuno reads as expert and conniving, a front he largely manages to maintain when dealing with two opposing gangs of uneducated, low-level street toughs. However, when his investigation expands to include women from a variety of backgrounds - from weeping widows to scheming madams - Mizuno's control over the unfolding counter-crosses quickly slips away.