At some point between making “Audition”, “Ichi the Killer” and “Dead or Alive”, notorious Japanese director Takashi Miike managed to direct the outlandish film “The City of Lost Souls”, a crime and gangster film that depicts the rotten underground of Tokyo.
Of course, this is all tedious stuff for Miike, who has been firmly entranced in the yakuza genre for his entire career where “The City of Lost Souls” departs from status is that Miike takes the examination to the subculture of foreigners living in Japan. Not the rich Westerners who come to do business, but the poor Brazilians, who are considered ‘Japanese for Brazil’ and ‘Brazilian for Japan’.
Japan is a country that is often displayed as being homogenous, and it’s rare to see films that dive deeper than skin deep, but Miike brings us a look into this gutter culture with the pleasant exoskeleton of a gangster movie.
Brazilian hood Mario hijacks a prison bus, taking illegal Chinese aliens back to China, to rescue his woman, the breathtaking Chinese actress Li Jia Xin. Li is so ethereally beautiful, dressed in white, like a soft spoken angel who has fallen in love with the demon and his way of life.
Miike is often criticized for being a ‘shock director’, looking only to create disturbing images and senseless scenes of violence. Personally, I find him to be one of the most inventive and daring directors in modern times, with the sheer creativity of his films making a sizable impact on the viewer.
“The City of Lost Souls” seems to be a gangster film, but it becomes clear that the action packed storyline is merely a vessel to show the treacherous undercurrents in Japanese society, Miike criticizing the blatant xenophobia in Japanese culture.
In one scene, the Brazilian Japanese are talking in a back alley, only to be pressed to the sides of the street as 100 workers, dressed identically in white shirts, ride past them in a well-timed stampeding commute, home from work; the workers pay no attention to the Brazilians, as if they were merely posters on the wall to be ignored.
It’s a vital, thrilling film, and you’ll be hard pressed to analyze Miike’s sentiments in the film as he continually thrusts fantastic action sequences on screen. Gunfights, switchblades, shots from below a toilet bowl, crazed cockfighting “The City of Lost Souls” is a hungover blur of demented visuals and bleary eyed violence, a DV recording of the wrecked inhabitants under a Tokyo bridge.
I say: Nonstop action and effortless cool only Miike could be this absurd with it all somehow making total sense.
See it for: The Brazilian subculture in Japan – I didn’t know anything about it, but it’s fascinating to see in this film they are, truly, refugees, trying to scratch out a living.
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