Gate of Flesh (1964) - #298

Does feeling human mean you can't go on living?

If asked to describe the distinctive characteristics of post-apocalyptic dystopian fantasy films, the fans, studios and creative talents all tend to agree: a futuristic setting in which human life is reduced to a squalid savage struggle for survival, with all the laws, mores and social norms of ordinary life cast aside as irrelevant niceties that only get in the way when one's next meal (or the satisfaction of other primordial urges) is up for grabs. This list (fairly definitive, in my opinion) contains films ranging as far back as  1936's Things to Come, 1962's La Jetee (arguably the first "modern" dystopian film) and as recent as this summer's Elysium. One title that it doesn't include is 1964's Gate of Flesh, but I suppose the oversight is forgivable. After all, Seijun Suzuki wasn't looking into some imaginary future in casting his vision of a world gone utterly mad. No, not at all. Instead, all he had to do was draw from his own memory bank, to that epoch of insane and barbaric turmoil that descended upon Japan in the months following the dropping of The Bomb and the surrender of that nation's Emperor and army in the summer of 1945. Even though it was created from a distance of nearly 20 years later than the era it evokes, Gate of Flesh is as close to a real-world post-apocalyptic narrative drama as I hope cinema will ever need to approximate (but my hope is hardly confident... more like wishful thinking, sad to say.)

Adapted from a novel published in 1947, when Tokyo and the other major Japanese metropoli were sweltering hotbeds of corruption, intrigue and debauchery, Gate of Flesh was basically seized upon by Nikkatsu Studio as an easy opportunity for exploitation, and assigned to Seijun Suzuki, who had broken out of the crank 'em out, B-movie mass production mold with Youth of the Beast in 1963. The censorship standards were loosening up quite a bit at that time, with audiences eager to see things happening up on the screen that had previously been forbidden. The story's premise of a group of brassy street-smart women who banded together to run their own prostitution ring, only to have their hustling scheme disrupted by the arrival of a virile loose cannon of a soldier just returned from combat, offered up all sorts of salacious visual possibilities - the allure of nubile, unclothed female bodies coupled in hot lust with their customers as they pursued their gritty trade; the satisfaction of depraved curiosities regarding the sadistic retribution on women who dared to break their perverse code of honor; wild outbursts of violence among rival factions in postwar Tokyo's lawless, anarchic underworld. All that and more is implicitly promised in the film's title: Gate of Flesh does indeed open its doors to spectacles of sexual explicitness, brutality and all-around kinkiness heretofore unseen in the Criterion Collection (chronologically speaking, of course... I know that Salo and The Night Porter, among others, preceded this film by a couple hundred spine numbers or so.)

So, taking all that brazen and grotesque taboo-busting as a given, and figuring that most adventurous cinephiles of 2013 have probably seen films more free-wheeling and sensationally provocative than Gate of Flesh ever had a chance to be, is there anything left to commend it? I think there is; quite a bit in fact, as it stirs up questions that still seem relevant and worth pondering in our own times. One of them is quoted at the top of this column, from toward the end of this film, which in its own way turns out to be a rather warped coming-of-age story, even though I've never read a review that frames it that way. The words are spoken by Maya, the 18-year old teenage girl we're introduced to at the beginning and whose departure from the scene provides the movie's finale. When we meet her, she's a scared, starving refugee, cast out for unknown reasons onto the streets of an unforgiving Tokyo slum surrounding an American military occupation base - is she an orphan, a runaway, a thrill-seeker? We're never told much about her origins, other than that she has a deceased brother whom she misses badly and dreams about vividly. But it's quite clear that she's desperate and that, despite her youth and vulnerability, there's no one in the world looking out for her. She resorts to thievery to get a simple bite to eat. When her vulnerability is spotted by an opportunistic would-be pimp, she endures a harsh beat-down but manages to escape, befriending Sen, a tough cookie clad in a bright red dress along the way. Sen sizes her up, recognizes her freshness in that hardened, heartless milieu and takes her under her wing. Maya is invited to take refuge with a gang of four street-walking hookers who run their own operation, about as close to a female-empowerment brigade as we're likely to see in that context, though not without its violently self-destructive, even metaphorically cannibalistic short-comings.

As a means for survival in this dangerous district, where stiffs are dragged out of alleys multiple times a day and merciless beatings only serve as a cheap form of public entertainment, Sen and her peers (chubby rambunctious Roku, sassy and scheming Mino, and Machiko, who distinguishes herself by wearing a traditional, wifely-modest kimono, in peculiarly attractive contrast to the bright skimpy dresses that cling to the bodies of her associates) have carved out a relatively safe and secure niche. Taking up residence in the bombed-out husk of an abandoned building, off the beaten path of patrolling MPs or drunken wandering thugs alike, the girls ply their trade with seeming impunity, able to pile on and punish any man who tries to take advantage of them... and any woman who violates the rules they've set up for themselves. The prime rule is to not engage in sex for free - no favors can be extended without compensation. Of course, that means love must be kept in check - a foolish emotion, a weakness not to be trusted, a spiral into suspicion and rivalry, a threat to their hard-earned security and independence.

Such is the sad state of affairs in this collapsed society, where some of life's most satisfying and fulfilling conditions - love, trust, mercy, forgiveness - are outlawed by those who stand most in need, because of the vulnerability they create for those who let down their guard and yield to such comforts. Maya herself, after she's been raped and abandoned, winds up discarded in a field. Her misery is shrugged off by the American military cops who first discover her, but she's immediately befriended by a compassionate priest who sincerely seeks to extend grace and peace to her through his divine commission. Though little is depicted of his ministry efforts on her behalf or the elementary steps of discipleship she takes in response to his kindness, there does seem to be some kind of rapport between the two, a willingness on her part to dare invest in the possibility of hope for her future. But Maya's subsequent experiences, as she sinks deeper into the morass of carnal exploitation and gut-wrenching cruelty that these wretched souls inflict on each other in some ragged approximation of justice, eventually lead her to a catastrophic betrayal of her would-be benefactor, and ultimately herself.

I have no idea how closely Seijun Suzuki adhered to the rough narrative outlines of his source material, or how much he diverged from it either. Though he didn't write the story, and the assignment was simply dropped on him as an obligation that he had no choice but to take according to the terms of his contract, Gate of Flesh surely feels like a personal project. After learning a bit from the supplemental interview on the DVD about his military career - basically a wild series of misadventures trying to evade death, since by the time he entered the army, the great battles of the Pacific War had already ceased - it's easy to see why he packed so much invective and rage toward the American military forces into his story, even if most of it comes out indirectly, by depicting them as lecherous lumbering goons, easily duped by con men, whores and gangsters because they could care less about learning the language and customs of the country they've occupied. Still, the Yanks have their weapons, and their accursed flag (a symbol of oppression, fit only to be spat upon) flies higher than anything else on the horizon, leaving the Japanese no choice but to ultimately debase themselves in order to squeeze a few extra yen and be left alone to conduct their sordid business in the shadows of their war-zone city.

As tragic and dismal of an environment as I've probably made the depiction of Tokyo in Gate of Flesh seem, Suzuki does an excellent job balancing out the misery with flamboyant humor, whimsical slapstick and even impromptu musical bits, all spiraling out toward the viewer most unpredictably from within a charmingly surreal and inventive set designed to evoke a mood as much as recreate the blasted charred remnants of Japan's capitol city. Hastily constructed, with a schedule calling for it all to be demolished and dismantled a mere 25 days after shooting began, production designer Takeo Kimura took random bits of wood, paint, sawdust and concrete and turned his imagination loose, giving the actors a gnarly audacious playground to go through their motions, all captured in garish bursts of color splashed across the widescreen. Suzuki piled on all sorts of other visual effects - double exposures, proto-psychedelic blurs, actors posing on turntables, artfully cast shadows to conceal impermissible flashes of nudity... some truly wild moments of eye-popping brilliance, involving butchery both mental and physical, along with glimpses of ecstasy and interpersonal warmth rendered tragic because of their forbidden quality and the high price we know that these unfortunate souls will have to pay because of their indulgence.

Beside all that, we get another demonstration of Joe Shishido's magnetic pull - building on his swaggering go-for-broke loner performance in Youth of the Beast, here he plays Shin, the grim, explosive "returnee" who brings all sorts of frightful baggage with him in the aftermath of his trauma-inducing deployment to northern China. Shin incarnates raw masculinity, stripped down to the essence of its gnashing, barbaric appetites for sex, food and violence, regarding all three as simple variations on one process of voracious consumption. Suzuki himself revels in the opportunity to turn Shishido loose for our entertainment, even though we all know instinctively that his meteoric blaze will just as rapidly be squelched before he's found any semblance of satisfaction.

Violence, crime, exploitation, lust, hunger, craving, betrayal, punishment, the longing for relief and the confusion of what to do with ourselves when the world falls to pieces around us... the experiences of Tokyo's war survivors, and their callous contempt for the American armies who claim a mission of maintaining order and rebuilding society along some new moral axis... given today's headlines and the realities of what is going on all around us, even those whose lives are rather placid and predictable in comparison... all this makes Gate of Flesh a film both timely and poignant, more than just a mere zany, gaudy skin flick of a half-century ago from the other side of the globe.

Next: Robinson Crusoe on Mars