I Will Buy You (1956)

Director: Masaki Kobayashi
Country: Japan

When  I talk about sports films I always think of Martin Scorsese's "Raging Bull" and Lindsay Anderson's "This Sporting Life" but now I will think of "I Will Buy You" directed by Masaki Kobayashi.

When I was a kid I used to dream about becoming a professional baseball player, I loved the baseball caps and gloves and I admired this beautiful game played by strong guys hitting home runs and throwing real lighting bolts but I did not know "the dark side of the moon" until I grew up, and this Kobayashi film is about that and more importantly it is about the human condition.

Japan was a developing country at the time struggling with the post-war puzzle, and even though we see other sports in the film such as horse racing, sumo wrestling and illegal dog fighting it had already developed its love and passion for the ultimate symbol of its American conquerors: the baseball game,

Kurita is the rising star of the college league and every professional team wants to hire him but he has a mentor named "Kyuki" who claims to be very sick and protects the player from singing contracts in order to rise Kurita's value in the market, Kishimoto on the other hand is the scout who wants to convince Kurita to play for the Toyo Flowers. Fueko who is Kurita's girlfriend starts losing hope in the relationship with him because all of the attention and offerings he is gettings from teams and media.

Greed, mistrust and betrayal, which are initially spread by Kishimoto whose lack of moral and ethics make them a professional businessman and the perfect one representing the morally corrupted industry of sports, start to take over Kurita's family, mentor, girlfriend and Kurita himself with catastrophic consequences. 

Money can corrupt anybody's soul no matter how pure the person is and this is pointed out by Fueko and Kishimoto (I loved the novelistic aspect of the film) because we know only through dialogue that Kurita used to be a good boy, we also know that Kyuki was an spy or a kind of a doble agent in China, and we know that the pitcher who was going to be hired by Kishimoto loses his fingers in a factory job so we can imagine the bleak future of Kurita repeating the cycle after the final events. 

Kurita became a cold-hearted person while Kishimoto understands that loyalty and respect are more important than money, but before the end we are trapped in a big network of lies and doble crossings between all characters, who is telling the truth? who is lying? and who is being loyal?. This film is a masterpiece (and definitely one of my favorites of all time) that makes us question ourselves about morality, values and respect. Capitalism is the system that rules our lives, and Kobayashi lambasted this system by pointing out how money can corrupt our minds and change our souls for the sake of money no matter if you are a baseball player, a journalist or a simple peasant.

P.S: Kudos for the Godzilla reference in the film!

Kurita in action

                           

Branded To Kill (1967)

Director: Seijun Suzuki
Country: Japan 

"Branded to Kill" is like free jazz: no rules, no conventional timing, no straight narrative and no romantic bullshit, instead it is an acid trip, or if you prefer is Melville, Buñuel, Furukawa, Godard and Andy Warhol mixed in a blender. 

Full of abstract, surrealist and artistic scenes and surprisingly pop-art images encrusted into the film, a beautiful chiaroscuro cinematography in combination with Naozumi Yamamoto incredible acid-jazz soundtrack, which provides a fastidious synchronicity that helps to maintain the energy through the entire film, this picture has been labeled as noir, but that's only part of it, because it's also a mistery-thriller with a chunk of satire and dense sex scenes that imply sadism and fetichism (snuffing the boiled rice and leg fetichism as well) and of course with a lot of action sequences too. 

Branded To Kill is starred by the magnificent and legendary actor Joe Shishido -well known for his role in "Youth Of The Beast", another Suzuki tour de force- is about a cold blooded killer who becomes the target of a Yakuza organization after failing the assasination of a foreign detective, he also becomes obsessed both with a woman (Mizuku) and with the misterious number one gunman. It has many remarkable scenes but I would like to write about the ones that fascinated me more. 

One of the most famous "eye scenes" in the history of cinema is from Luis Buñuel's "Un Chien Andalou" (1929) but in Suzuki's Branded To Kill we have a very powerful and brutal scene involving an eye too, also Suzuki created a beautiful pop-art picture in movement in this film, when Goro Hanada shoots the first of four men behind a billboard's animatronic lighter, that sequence is simply beautiful, and maybe the most ingenious one is when Hanada shoots the second guy in the face through a pipe drain (Jim Jarmush stole this one for his 1999 film "Ghost Dog") . 

Technically Suzuki used jump cuts, fade out transitions, static, handheld camera and point of view shots and in addition to the animated images he also used inverted colors in some scenes; silence is executed in a deftly way and complements the acid-jazz soundtrack .

Due to its complex, tricky and non-conventional narrative, the audience can get lost while watching the movie, but that's the beauty of it, maybe the number one never existed and Hanada gone crazy, maybe the woman he loves is actually dead or if you want to think that everything could be an hallucination feel free to do it, you can think whatever you want about the plot, the story and the ending, because Suzuki made one of the most twisted and unique movies ever; this is an absolute and crazy masterpiece that I saw twice in a row and no wonder Suzuki got fired and banned from the Japanese industry during 10 years after this!. 

If you want to know more about the production and background of this film click here to check out this film essay written by the great saxophonist John Zorn who is also a big fan of "Branded To Kill"   enjoy!