“What are they living for? Their faces are lifeless, dead. They’re desperately pretending to be alive.”
The words are spoken, in voiceover, by a yakuza who has just been released from a prison stretch after a gang-related killing in the Japanese “squid-ink noir” Pale Flower, the 1964 film reissued as part of the Criterion Collection. The yakuza, Muraki (the stoic Ryo Ikebe), is referring overtly to the sad-eyed, robotic sararimen (businessmen) who trudge out of Tokyo’s commuter train stations every morning and evening. Nobody appears more weary and dispirited than Muraki himself.
Shortly after making his inadvertently self-directed observation, Muraki is back in his old milieu, gambling with his mob cronies, consorting listlessly with his mistress, and scuttling away from police raids. There isn’t much else to do because his gang and their main rivals established an alliance during his internment. Thus, we observe them numbly “playing” their zero-sum game (it’s called hanafuda, but it could just as easily be any other form of gambling in which the cards are laid down, the money scooped up, the cards picked up, and the money laid down again, all through the night, obsessively, at the end of which nothing has been accomplished except that a fixed amount of well-thumbed currency has been circulated among the participants, temporarily “won” and then lost again.) It’s easy to see the constant gambling as a metaphor for these gangsters’ unproductive lives, with their endless making and breaking of alliances, wars, prison terms, mechanical sexual dalliances, and literal and figurative backstabbings.
Into this scene arrives a dewy woman named Saeko (pronounced, more or less, “psycho”) who is very young and, for whatever reason, very tired of life. Saeko (Mariko Kaga) is magnetic and enigmatic – we learn virtually nothing about her except that she’s in love with gambling, fast driving, and excitement – and soon, she and Muraki are spending a lot of time together. Their relationship is curiously sexless – one-on-one gambling seems to be their preferred form of intercourse. (She says to him, “Since that night I first saw you, I’ve wanted a private game with you.”) Eventually, she is allowed the privilege of witnessing Muraki murdering someone (he says, “When I stabbed him, I felt more alive than I ever had before”), but throughout, nothing but her eventual death will bring Saeko whatever it is she is searching for.
Masahiro Shinoda’s Pale Flower is not a plot-driven film, though Muraki dodges a couple of attempted assassinations, and viewers are likely to come away from it remembering the story less than the compelling, nightmarish score from the great Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu. Another thing viewers likely will remember is the hopelessly glowing face of the petal-like Mariko Kaga in the otherwise pitch-black mise-en-scene. The actress went on to a long and successful career in Japan. As for her character, it’s helpful to know that the film’s title is more accurately translated as “‘withered flower’, clearly indicating that death, more than simple pallor, is what’s most crucially at stake”. (These words, as well as the invaluable term “squid-ink noir” are taken from a well-written essay about Pale Flower by Chuck Stephens, included in booklet form with the Criterion package.)
Pale Flower is a bit too diffident and, for its time, too fashionably existential to qualify as a great film, but it’s certainly haunting. Once you’ve asked yourself what those anonymous Tokyo commuters are working for and what those benumbed yakuza gamblers are gambling for, it’s tempting to switch off the DVD player and, in the darkness of your living room, not ask yourself the very same question.