Elegant Beast (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Adam Bingham

Produced by Osamu Yaneda and Masaki Suda; directed by Yuzo Kawashima; written by Kaneto Shindo; cinematography by Nobuo Munekawa; edited by Tatsuji Nakashizu; starring Ayako Wakao, Yunosuke Ito, Hisano Yamaoka, Yuko Hamada, Manamitsu Kawabata, Eiji Funakoshi, and Hideo Takamatsu. Region A and B Blu-ray, color, Japanese dialogue with English subtitles, 1962. A Radiance Films release.

The work of Yuzo Kawashima has, slowly but steadily, been finding its way into the consciousness of ardent international Japanophiles. Long an idolized figure among Japanese filmmakers and cinephiles alike, idolized by such iconoclastic auteurs as Shohei Imamura and Toshiaki Toyoda (the latter of whose reflections on Elegant Beast and its director are offered in this Blu-Ray release), the satirical, often bawdy, and subversive films of this director seem custom-made for cult acclaim. A restless nomad of a filmmaker whose career saw him traverse the diverse climates of four of Japan’s major postwar film studios and several of its key genres, Kawashima was frequently desirous of probing beneath the façade of “normal” or civilized Japanese life and uncovering the festering wounds that are in various ways compromising life in the country. He broached classical and new wave aesthetics and subject matter— sometimes, as here, in one film—and is thus a genuinely important director, and there are few better examples of this than Elegant Beast. 

Although Kawashima is better-known for his raucous jida-geki (period film) Bakumatsu Taiyo-den (1957), Elegant Beast may be seen as something of a companion piece. Like that (and other Kawashima works) Elegant Beast is set almost entirely in a claustrophobic single space where stories overlap, characters, classes, and generations collide, and hitherto concealed actions and motivations are brought to light. It is a microcosmic world wherein interpersonal relations feel like transactions and, typically for a director who directly explored prostitution both in Bakumatsu Taiyo-den and in Suzaki Paradise: Red Light District (1956), where the commodification of desire is a fundamental feature of almost everyone’s lives. Here, in place of said period comedy’s central brothel, the single space is a contemporary danchi (postwar two-room) apartment where, for the most part, a strictly observed unity of time and space masks an expansive inquiry into Japan’s postwar development. It feels like a play—imagine Harold Pinter in Japan—yet this staginess is precisely the point as performance and performativity become key to the narrative. 

With this, Elegant Beast is very much a Kawashima picture. It unpicks the scabrous lives and proclivities of a seemingly unremarkable family. The meek patriarch Tokizo Maeda (Yunosuke Ito) is a former naval officer apparently pining for a militaristic past while at the same time lamenting the poverty in which his family once had to live and adamant that they do not return to this state. His wife, Yoshino (Hisano Yamaoka), appears to be a submissive and dutiful spouse, an appearance that soon begins to crack when the couple’s two young adult children enter the narrative and the apartment. The boy, Minoru (Manamitsu Kawabata), quickly emerges as a habitual embezzler, while his sister Tomoko (Yuko Hamada) has just left a popular writer for whom she was a mistress and whose reputation and wealth has been exploited by Minoru as part of his crimes. 

An investigation by Minoru’s employer into his ill-gotten gains includes the company secretary Yukie (Ayako Wakao), who is subsequently revealed to be key to Minoru’s activities. As befits her status as a curiously domestic femme fatale, Minoru (like several other men in the film) is besotted with her, and it makes her a central figure, a spectral presence whose appearance at crucial junctures in the narrative reflects a crisis point for different male figures. Wakao, drawing on her work with Yasuzo Masumura, plays this elegant woman as someone who almost seems to believe the tales she spins and regards those around her as steppingstones whose willingness to indulge her can only be exploited, as though it is her duty to do so. In what is perhaps a nod to the title of Mikio Naruse’s When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960), there is a sporadic subjective insert of this woman walking up a very large staircase, while the fact that she has opened her own bar echoes, and twists, Naruse’s lament for the plight of working women in Japan as they attempt to take their place in the new economy. For Wakao’s character, it is an economy of the body as much as it is about fiduciary procurement, and in this is an intertextual nod to the difficulties facing professional women in postwar Japan and its patriarchal capitalist social structure. Wakao becomes a mirror image of her Narusian counterpart, who is also a bar hostess, but one who is undermined by those around her rather than gaining from them.

Beyond the human figures, the apartment is also revealed to be a key character in Elegant Beast. As a fascinating video essay made for this Blu-Ray by Tom Mes makes clear, the danchi style of cheap 1950s housing represented a particular aesthetic in housing that accommodated a population boom of those returning from war and those new families coming into being. The fact that it was bought by the writer (a lurid pulp novelist) as a place for his trysts with Tomoko and was latterly converted into an (unsuitable) family home wherein the generations live on top of one another becomes almost a parody of the home dramas seen in Yasujiro Ozu’s or Mikio Naruse’s work of the shomin-geki genre. Significantly, its spatial constrictions make voyeurs of all the protagonists at one time or another as they are at different times variously obliged to try to hide in order avoid or simply to spy on a conversation between others. 

Said constrictions also demand a specific shooting style, around which the film works superbly. Shooting in the widescreen Daieiscope 2.35:1 aspect ratio, Kawashima and cinematographer Nobuo Munekawa (hitherto veteran of a number of post-Godzilla creature features) make much of the discrepancy between the expanse of the frame and the restrictions of the set. Indeed, it is intriguing to posit the extent to which the placements of the camera are marked by practical as much as aesthetic concerns. That is, it seems as often as not as though the camera were placed in the only viable space from which it could film the events of the narrative. Moreover, the fact that setups are never repeated throughout the course of the narrative cements both this dual signification, as well as suggesting the primacy of a perception that belongs to no one character but rather to a consciousness that modulates and manipulates point of view in such a way as to destabilize any clear sense of focalization. 

Elegant Beast is a clear forerunner and progenitor of the spiky, satirical family dramas that proliferated in the 1980s—The Family Game (1983), The Funeral (1984), Crazy Family (1984)—as Japan’s economic miracle reached its apex and its cinema all but imploded. At this time, the family became a repository of all that had been stripped of meaning, and Kawashima and writer Kaneto Shindo (later director of Kuroneko [1968]) similarly view said unit as a site of transgression and turmoil. The Elegant Beast (or graceful brute as some translations have it) of the title is from this perspective significant. Is it one of the family members? Is it the family unit? Is it a particular trait that unites members of said unit (greed, jealousy, sexual desire, or the paths taken to fulfilling or satiating the same)? Is it Japan itself—a country in which official promises of individual and collective betterment have created social chasms and nostalgia for a militarized past? 

Importantly, the individual impulses and conflicting imperatives do not shatter the unit. It is not that the family is strong enough to withstand the forces acting against it. Rather, it is their own needs and wants that each overlap. Any forces become collectively enshrined and echo one another to the extent that, for example, Minoru’s embezzlements help to fund his family’s lifestyle as his father’s incessant demands make plain, or indeed the house that they live is attributable, for all intents and purposes, to his sister’s prostitution of herself. It is a central ambiguity as to the degree to which these characters have been, as it were, created by modern Japan or whether their actions have contributed to the state of the nation. The nefarious need for money that in various ways unites the family members reflects the country’s drive toward its economic miracle, yet the view of the danchi block and the immediate environs, glimpsed in particular in a telling final image of decay, suggests a world separate or distinct from material success, an insular world already suggested by the restricted spatiotemporality and one that suggests much about the stratification of the country at this key sociohistorical juncture.

In addition to the extra features outlined above, the disc includes an interview with Japanese film critic Toshiaki Sato that also delves into Kawashima’s career and his cinematic style and legacy. All help frame what is a fascinating, complex, subversive work, and one hopes that it will lead to more of this great director’s films being released in what seems to be a concerted effort by Radiance Films to uncover and distribute hitherto hidden gems from Japan.

Adam Bingham lives and works in the U.K. where he teaches film studies.

Copyright © 2024 by Cineaste, Inc.

Cineaste, Vol. XLIX, No. 3