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. 

A Colt is My Passport

Joe Shishido stars as Kamimura, a contract killer caught in a web of criminal intrigue that - one unusually thorough assassination aside - has more in common with the creeping avarice of a corporate merger than it does street-level passions. Kamimura is a methodical criminal, a cold-blooded presence who, when he's left to his own devices, is better tuned to the detached rhythms of staking out his quarry and thinking through the mechanical processes of their termination. Director Takashi Nomura and screenwriters Shuichi Nagahara and Nobuo Yamada build their opening moments around a similar sort of incidental expertise as that exhibited by James Bond in the early Terence Young entries: having settled into a vacant nest overlooking his target's garden, Kamimura lights a cigarette; not to calm his nerves but so he can hold it out of a window to judge the wind directions that will soon be acting upon his gunfire. This predatory, reptilian intelligence, so suited to generating and extinguishing turmoil, is less useful in A Colt is My Passport's middle-section. There the heaving drama is turned over to Chitose Kobayashi's Mina, a forlorn truck stop worker who fixates on Kamimura, imagining some sort of emotional connection between herself and a murderer simply seeking safe passage out of the country. This interruption ends up working for Nomura's film, suggesting a conclusion far less exciting than the one we end up getting: Shishido running straight at the camera, firing every gun he can lay his hands on.