Winter’s Flower (1978)

Original title: Fuyu no hana

After fifteen years spent in prison for murdering a friend and traitor to his group, yakuza Kano (Ken Takakura) is released.

Not much awaits him outside. Well, there’s an empty apartment bought for him as a make-up gift for his sacrifice, and, for complicated reasons, the now teenage daughter of the man he killed. While he was in prison, Kano wrote letters “from Brazil” to the girl, pretending to be her uncle, while providing her with money and protection through his yakuza friends. Now, outside, he’s circling around the borders of her life. She has turned into a symbol of a life not lived where guilt and the daughter he never had meet, and he’s sad and wise enough to know that actually meeting the girl would not lead anywhere good.

So the sad middle-aged man goes back to the yakuza life. He’s doing so only reluctantly, and he is encountering old friends and associates that mostly seem just as dissatisfied with it as he is, just less conscious of how much they are going nowhere. Unlike Kano, they are blaming the times instead of themselves.

Mirroring what happened fifteen years ago, there’s pressure for Kano’s group to unite with another, bigger, more powerful, more modern and more ruthless one. Very much despite of himself(or is it because of himself?), Kano is letting himself be drawn into repeating the same bad choices he made when he probably didn’t know any better.

Yasuo Furuhata’s Winter’s Flower is very typical of the yakuza films Ken Takakura starred in at this stage in his career, when the genre wasn’t as successful anymore, and Takakura had been doing predominantly other types of films for quite some time. In the yakuza films he still made, often directed by Furuhata, and not really fitting into the ninkyo/jitsuroku divide, Takakura was always a man of his actual age, either having left the yakuza life only to be drawn in again, or not quite managing to in the first place.

These are films dominated by a quiet, very middle-aged, sadness and melancholia. It’s not the railing at the skies of the young, but the quieter kind of desperation of lives badly spent, promises broken and hopes that have just faded away, perhaps alleviated by a hope for some kind of simple, quiet contentment that the men in these films inevitably can’t quite keep their grips on. These are qualities Takakura embodied as much as those of the upright yakuza of his earlier years, with a subtle, and never whiny, gravitas that feels as if it came from lived experience – his performances in this part of career are all deep gazes and small gestures as far away from melodrama as possible, and feel as true to an actual inner life expressed this way as I can imagine.

This is how Winter’s Flower works as a whole – there are opportunities to great melodrama and violence in the plot, but Furuhata decides to focus on quieter readings of situations and characters that develop the pull of truthfulness by an insistence on quietly observing Kano and his world. Melodrama is for the young, and this is a movie neither about, nor for, them, and so the unflashy, steady direction doesn’t try to sell this tale to them.

As a middle-aged guy myself, I can relate.