Yokohama BJ Blues (1981)

Apparently, you can’t make a living by being a singer of mediocre Japanese blues rock alone in early 80s Yokohama, so singer BJ (Yusaku Matsuda), also works as a private detective. Well, maybe it’s the other way round.

Be that as it may, a long-time friend of BJ’s, and also married to BJ’s former flame Tamiko (Mari Henmi), is making his own living as a corrupt cop, taking payments from a criminal organization known as “The Family”. He wants out, though, and is just about to tell all to the non-corrupt parts of the police. Alas, while he’s explaining all this to BJ during a semi-clandestine meeting, he is shot with a high calibre bullet.

For reasons quite divorced from facts and evidence, the dead cop’s partner hold BJ responsible for the killing – he just can’t prove it (mostly because it’s not true, one supposes) – so it behoves our protagonist to find out who really killed his friend not only for reasons of revenge but also of self-preservation.

His investigation appears to mostly consist of a slow, drifting movement through Yokohama’s night and dawn life, where he encounters members of The Family, yakuza, a gay biker gang, a barely legal rent boy runaway he’ll have a gay frolicking montage with. Some of those less interesting in frolicking do rather want to murder BJ, as well.

I’ve mostly seen chambara and jidai-geki from Yokohama BJ Blues’ director Eiichi Kudo before, most of them rather energetically directed and fast-moving (at least as I remember them). This film is not like them at all. Rather, it is dominated by a sense of late night languidness, or really, the more specific late night languidness of people who have spent years drifting through nights and dawns.

The film projects a sense of a melancholia that has hardened to the glass jar feeling of clinical depression, so that every movement its characters make seems aimless, joyless, and generally slow and effusive. Human relationships for the most part appear vague, unfocussed, dominated by loss and betrayal, but loss and betrayal whose emotional impact BJ holds at arms’ length. He’s just too tired and melancholic to even feel them, it appears.

It’s really only some of the musical performances and the scene where BJ – presented as clearly bisexual in the most wonderfully normalized manner possible – frolics with the male prostitute that break through the fog. Lifted fog can’t keep in the slow noir world of the film, of course.

This leads to a movie that’s so slow and loose, most of its dramatic gestures and its complicated plot seem mired in some kind of brain fog – there’s really little conventional tension here, and even what would be an action climax in other films is here very consciously turned abstract and distant by Kudo. For make no mistake, this isn’t an aging filmmaker having lost his touch, but one using the opportunity the ruins of the Japanese studio system of the time offer to stretch in interesting and different directions and speak in ways he couldn’t quite before.

Seen as a thriller or a straightforward crime movie, this is of course no success at all. As a film that’s ultra-focussed on turning the sense of ennui and alienation its protagonist, or the whole of Japanese society as it is portrayed here, suffers from, it is a rousing success, full of incandescently beautiful shots of the ugly parts of a slowly decaying Yokohama and a central performance by Matsuda that lets his natural cool curdle into a detachment beyond hopelessness.