Masahiro Shinoda/Japan/1969; R1
Criterion, US$29.95 | Reviewed by Mubarak Ali

JAPANESE performance art expresses itself so rarely on film – especially as distilled as it is in Masahiro Shinoda's experimental film – that it becomes an almost alien but undeniably rich, culturalist experience in itself. The sixties witnessed many Japanese directors influenced by the daring narrative structures of the French New Wave, and their attempts to combine intrinsic Japanese stories with a more European style of filmmaking created works which are fascinatingly antithetical to the classicist masterworks of earlier directors like Ozu and Mizoguchi.

Kobayashi and Shindo demystified Japanese myths for a more Western audience in Kwaidan and Onibaba respectively, and Ichikawa's deliriously campy An Actor's Revenge – to which Double Suicide's own aesthetic owes a lot – challenged audiences to involve themselves in the heightened melodrama of the kabuki theatre. Shinoda's film is based on a popular 1720 Bunraku puppet play, Double Suicide at Amijima, by famed dramatist Monzaemon Chikamatsu, and like the aforementioned Ichikawa film, it blurs the line between the theatrical and the cinematic, while embracing Brechtian approaches to storytelling.

The film begins with a telephone conversation between the director and the writer of the puppet play in a behind-the-scenes milieu where the kuroko (the garbed-in-black Bunraku puppeteers who control the movements of the stringless marionettes on stage, barely visible to the audience) are in rehearsal with the puppets. This modern-day set then morphs into a jedai-geki setting, where the puppets in the story have been substituted by human actors. As the story unfolds, it starts to become clear that this is, at least on its beautiful black-and-white surface level, a love story in the vein of Romeo and Juliet: Jihei (Kichiemon Nakamura) is a paper merchant who is in love with a geisha, Koharu (Shima Iwashita) and his inability to redeem her from her master leads them to devise a synchronised double suicide to be "together in death", against the desperate implorings of his wife, Osan (also played by Iwashita) and family members. Kabuki-like histrionics are evident in several scenes, especially when female characters are involved: the sequence where Osan – all shrieks and gasps and wails – confronts her husband over the matter, is deliberately so over-the-top that it's almost unwatchable (the scene made all the more claustrophobic with Shinoda's use of long takes, confined space, and limited camera movement).

Present in that scene (and practically every other scene throughout the film) are the kuroko's. They don't seem to be seen by the characters as they skirt about the film's mise-en-scene (they actually are part of the mise-en-scene), at times disturbing the set to prepare for the next scene, or even lending an invisible helping hand to the characters, their presence a Brechtian device to encourage distance and an experimental attempt to merge age-old Bunraku theatre and modern cinema. Their presence achieves a particular eeriness in the brilliantly edited final minutes, as the film's doomed lovers finally make love in the graveyard through which they're passing to get to the site of the suicide, and this act of quasi-voyeurism (along with the act of breaking free from the 'stage' to which the characters are confined to for most of the film) points toward a self-evolution of the film's style from theatre to cinema, and for the forbidden lovers, the orgasm in the graveyard locates sexual freedom in death. And no matter how much Shinoda tries to push us away emotionally, the utter desperation of it all is truly moving.


THE Criterion DVD comes with a typically laudable transfer, from the sharp b/w photography (with minimal specks) to the maintenance of the original aspect ratio. Visually, the contrast works well to highlight the film's geometry of dominant vertical lines (which, of course, symbolise the characters' existential imprisonment). Audio quality is fine, and the legendary Toru Takemitsu's minimalist-but-electric score is one of the reasons to see (/hear) the film. One major drawback of this edition, however, is the lack of extra features besides the included essay by feminist film theorist, Claire Johnston.