Pistol Opera **** (Masterpiece) Directed by Seijun Suzuki Written by Kazunori Ito and Takeo Kimura With Makiko Esumi, Sayoko Yamaguchi, Masatoshi Nagase, Kan Hanae, Mikijiro Hira, Kirin Kiki, Haruko Kato, Yeong-he-Han, and Jan Woudstra.
Having recently seen the movie again with subtitles and read a few rundowns of the plot, I’m only more confused about its meaning. The gist of the narrative is that a beautiful young hit woman known as Stray Cat (Makiko Esumi)–“No. 3” in the pecking order of the Guild, the unfathomable, invisible organization she works for–aspires to be No. 1 and proceeds to bump off most of her male colleagues.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
I don’t subscribe to notions of “pure cinema” or “pure style,” because even abstraction has content–color, shape, movement. But this free-form and deeply personal movie suggests purity more than any other recent film that comes to mind. It’s often as abstract and as stringently codified as Cuban cartoonist Antonio Prohias’s Spy vs Spy comic strip in Mad, though the color of most of the kimonos is too gorgeously lush to evoke Prohias’s minimalism. And the feeling of sacred passion conveyed by many of the compositions–the sense that many of the characters, costumes, props, and settings are the objects of Suzuki’s unreasoning worship, as carefully placed and juxtaposed as totems in a Joseph Cornell box–imbues the whole film with some of the aura of ecstatic religious art, even if it’s cast in the profanely riotous pop colors of a Frank Tashlin.
This may sound like a recipe for formalism–especially given that the film’s subtitle is Killing With Style–but there’s far too much content in Pistol Opera to make its dream patterns feel arbitrary or reducible to a simple theme-and-variations format. Indeed, one of the reasons I find the film so exhausting is that it doesn’t take time out for anything. Whatever it’s after, it always feels on-target.
