An Ode to Yakuza (1970)

aka Yakuza Masterpiece

aka The Big Pay-Off

Original title: Yakuza zesshô

Mid-level yakuza Minoru (Shintaro Katsu) hasn’t ever met a problem he didn’t solve with violence. Even though this does lead to a degree of respect among his thuggish brothers, he is not a man equipped for much of a visible emotional range between rage and the kind of nastiness you’d expect this kind of man to show towards, say, women like his girlfriend Kanae (Kiwako Taichi).

The only exception here is Minoru’s eighteen years old half-sister Akane (Naoko Otani), whom he has taken care of since she was a little girl. To Akane, he’s about as sweet and kind as he can be, or at least he believes he is. To the outside observer he’s controlling and overbearing, trying to run his sister’s life even though she’s very well equipped to have more than just a little say in her own life story. In truth, Akane can’t help but notice an undertone of more than just brotherly affection from him, something, to be fair to the guy, Minoru can’t even quite admit to himself. Obviously, he is driving away every man interested in Akane is merely because he is being protective, right?

When the film starts, Akane has just about had enough of the whole thing, and decides the best way to get Minoru off her case is to seduce one of her teachers, so Minoru will have to stop seeing her as a pure, little girl.

Which isn’t even the emotional breaking point of Yasuzo Masumura’s pretty incredible melodrama, but a good enough point to understand where the director is going with his film.

Seen from a certain perspective, the tiny yakuza sub-plot and the film’s title(s) can seem stitched on to an intense, somewhat sleazy melodrama, but really, is there a better example for a kind of traditional patriarchal brutishness that treats excluding (at best), using, and mistreating women as a matter of principle than the yakuza?

And isn’t is exactly this sort of social machinery that drives the – most often at least quietly feminist – genre of the melodrama? So this isn’t so much a case of Masumura cheating with labels as him looking at the yakuza world from an angle even critical traditional yakuza movies tend to avoid.

This is, social aspects aside, of course also a film about people who drive each other to desperation out of ideas about love and identity that can’t come together, love – and Minoru and Akane do indeed love one another in their ways – that can only express itself destructively, and acts of escape that only make everyone’s situation that much worse.

All of this is driven by Masumura’s subtly heated direction that seems to trap his characters in the abyss of their own feelings, but also by two fantastic central performances. Katsu – one of the all-time greats in Japanese genre cinema not just because of the Zatoichi films – manages to make Minoru brutal, ugly, and genuinely disgusting, but also as sad and lost as any man you’d care to imagine, controlled by pressures internal and external he genuinely can neither grasp nor understand; whereas the very young Otani shows Akane’s intelligence and courage, her awakening understanding of love and her own sexuality as well as the way her brother’s brokenness has already begun to cause cracks in herself as a complex web of emotions she desperately needs to escape.

So, Yakuza Masterpiece is the proper title for this, even though the deeply ironic An Ode to Yakuza is probably the better one.