A YAKUZA IN LOVE

Keeping in line with his other crossover films, Japanese director Rokuro Mochizuki's A YAKUZA IN LOVE tempers crime movie conventions with elements of oddball romance. A surprising and fascinating little concoction of a film, this 1997 effort is everything we should expect from the maker of ANOTHER LONELY HITMAN (1996) and ONIBI: THE FIRE WITHIN (1997), the way it juggles so confidently from one mood and approach to the next.

Working for Yakuza boss Mr Ohkuma, Kin is distracted from his surveillance of a rival gangster he is to assassinate when he sees a beautiful young woman enter a café. Though his first meeting with her is awkward, when he goes into the eatery, Kin eventually convinces her to go out with him. Taking her to a restaurant, Kin spikes her drink, and easily gets her to go back to his room. After having sex, Kin finds that his yearning for Yoko is getting in the way of his work, when he finds that his boss Ohkuma has been admitted into hospital for vomiting blood. With his boss dying of terminal cancer, Kin comes to difficult dilemma, torn as he is between loyalty to the man he looks up to and love for the only woman to have shown him kindness during his life.

Most love stories bring together a real clash of personalities, or at least the ones that prove to be successful do. With A YAKUZA IN LOVE, auteur Mochizuki again goes one better by placing this romance in the middle of a clash between different genres - comedy romance and gangster. The difference between the slovenly, loud gangster (Kin) and the elegant, quiet waitress (Yoko) could not be made more apparent. Indeed, Kin comes up with an interesting way to win her over after a very awkward first attempt. Managing to get a date with Yoko, Kin spikes her drink when she goes away to the toilet, just to make sure that he spends the night with her. It pays off, given the resulting night of sex. Clearly, Kin is cut from the same cloth as the protagonists of ONIBI and ANOTHER LONELY HITMAN. Messy gangster politics and complex instances of betrayal and double cross are again jettisoned in favour of a purer mode of human feeling.

This is a quietly funny film, and plenty of humour is generated from Kin's bizarre lack of urgency as to his job, which involves doing away with a member of a rival gang. Freely admitting that should he get the job wrong, his life could be on the line, he still spends most of his time messing around with his love conquest. The film's most amusing moment occurs when Kin's sidekick, in a ridiculous disguise, tries to shoot the targets. After they jump in a car, a man pleads with him not to pull the trigger, and in a panic the would-be assassin complies! This comic moment is made even more successful by the cutaways to an oblivious Kin, who is off swanning around somewhere with - guess who? - Yoko.

Though the film works because it balances disparate threads so finely, it doesn't all convince. The character of Yoko isn't wholly satisfying. Though taken somewhat against her will at first, one wonders why she sticks around with Kin. To see her tend to his dying boss is a bit disappointing, and in this case she does come across as a disappointingly submissive female character. However, things certainly do improve later on, and if she doesn't carry a massive amount of narrative push, she does at least help our anti-hero to find out who he really is, even if it might be too late.

Perhaps best taken as a comedy or errors, the appropriately titled A YAKUZA IN LOVE finds its ultimate expression in one excellent sequence. With his boss dead, Kin, disguised as a female dancer, appears on the stage of a show watched by his targets. Ready to let off some shots and get his revenge on the men who betrayed his father figure, Kin is prevented by one concerned female spectator, who leaps at him and makes him miss. It's an amusing mishap, and takes us to a successfully comic scene in which Kin, in female attire, legs it through the streets in escape. Naturally, it is his paramour Yoko, whose actions thwarts her love, and takes him to a moment of clarity - in this intelligent little film for open-minded connoisseurs of eclectic world cinema.

Review by Matthew Sanderson