Giants and Toys (1958)
Giants and Toys starts out at a breakneck pace and never lets up, jumping out at the audience immediately with a peppy and loud theme song and a slickly designed photo montage. This sets the mood for the entire film as it follows the intense and often chaotic world of advertisement and corporations and the trials and tribulations of three confectionery companies.
The main viewpoint follows a young go-getter named Nishi (Hiroshi Kawaguchi) who is hungry to make a splash at World Caramel which is ran by the ulcer-ridden, pill-popping Goda (Hideo Takamatsu). Making candy is a cut-throat business and World Caramel has to compete with Giant and Apollo, two other entities trying to corner the sweets market.
Fortunately, Goda discovers Kyoko (Hitomi Nozoe) an unrefined but amicable taxi company phone operator who has the ability to charm everyone around her. Ironically, she sports a set of decayed teeth which normally wouldn't be a good representation for a candy company (what with the belief that eating too much candy rots one's teeth) but Kyoko's dressed down demeanor ends up being incredibly relatable and she becomes a big hit for the company.
Director Masumura is interested in how capitalism both enhances and destroys people's lives. Living only to make money leaves little room for meaningful personal relationships, and this is made extremely clear in how Nishi's commitment to his lover is strained by Goda's constant requests and pressure to put the company's wants and needs above his own. Kyoko also goes through a transformative arc, starting out as a naive fun loving girl and eventually becoming a distant prima donna as she rockets up the heights of stardom. Kyoko is treated like an extension of the companies product and eventually loses her sense of self as a result.
Giants and Toys is an overwhelming film both visually and aurally with bright colors and fast editing blasting full speed alongside fast moving interactions and dialog. This can make it hard to follow at times, but it culminates in an over-the-top third act that ties everything together and delivers a rather nihilistic punchline that skewers both capitalism and Japanese work culture.
Red Angel (1966)
Red Angel is a profoundly sad work, precariously teetering on full nihilism. At its core it is an exploration of lack of agency during wartime, when men and women alike are used as things, their bodies as ammunition, deployed for what is, on an individual level, ambiguous reasons. Wars are always fought to protect and enforce ideologies, but once it gets filtered down to the boots on the ground all of that grand posturing is thrown to the side and is replaced by only the will to survive.
The story follows Sakura Nishi (Ayako Wakao) a young Japanese nurse who has been sent to the front lines during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Shortly after reaching her assignment she is raped by one of the patients at the hospital. This serves as her grim introduction into the dark world of wartime medicine where even the nurses are not safe from abuse and despair. Nishi is bombarded with death daily, as the field hospital is constantly filled with mortally wounded soldiers.
Supplies are short and the doctors resort to amputation to save lives as they do not have the resources to do more complicated surgeries. It is a blessing in disguise that this film is in black-and-white as it would very likely be unbearable to watch in color. Several amputations are shown and the rooms are crowded with blood-splattered buckets full of discarded limbs.
Nishi tries to use her sexuality as some sort of a panacea, a way to give patients peace during their suffering. She views it as an extension of her being a nurse and perhaps some sort of guilt alleviation because there is more death and pain than she could ever deal with in lifetime. It might be tempting to paint Nishi as a martyr, but in reality these are illogical decisions informed by an illogical environment. It’s definitely a provocative character trait because the roots of it are firmly planted in misogyny.
At one point, Nishi is treating comfort women who are sick with cholera and several soldiers burst into the clinic because they are angry they can't sleep with them. When Nishi tries to scold them they turn their attention onto her and try to rape her as well. This illustrates the low station that women occupied during this time--no matter what position women held they were at the mercy of men's lust.
Red Angel is well shot--a mixture of claustrophobic and chaotic hospital interiors and gruesome outdoor war scenes. Despite the permeating darkness of tone, there are a few fleeting moments of sensuality and eroticism, particularly in the third act with Nishi's interaction with her would-be lover Doctor Okabe (Shinsuke Ashida). The gut-punch ending firmly plants this film into the anti-war realm, a plaintive wail asking "Why did this have happen?!" with no answer in return.
Blind Beast (1969)
Blind Beast almost feels like two different films in one. The first half presents itself as a thriller of sorts, concerning the kidnapping and imprisonment of a young woman, and the second half takes a hard left into psychosexual exploitation. This tone shift may be jarring for some and perhaps raise questions about its depiction of Stockholm syndrome, a phenomenon that didn't even have a name until several years after this movie was made.
The film follows Aki (Mako Midori), a beautiful fashion model who engages in risqué nude work. Her photos and a statue of her body are featured in a gallery, and upon visiting one day she comes upon a blind man (Eiji Funakoshi), sensually caressing every inch of her stone doppelganger, fondling it as if he were about to make love to it. Aki is initially repulsed but finds herself simultaneously turned on by the display.It turns out that the blind man is Michio, a sculptor who is obsessed with exploring making art through touch and that his specific focus is in depicting body parts. Michio poses as Aki's massage therapist and with the help of his mother drugs and kidnaps Aki with intent to use her as his unwilling model for his masterpiece. The rest of the film is concerned with how Aki and Michio interact with each other as she roams Michio's bizarre and surreal art studio trying to find a way to escape.
Michio's studio is fantastically realized--the walls are covered in giant white body parts and the center is dominated with two enormous statues of naked women lying on the floor. These figures are large enough for the actors to crawl on and run around, and it's quite a sight to witness characters have an extended conversation on a giant breast. It is obvious that Michio has a fixation on the female form, and that his art is a direct expression of his sexual frustration. He has objectified women in the most literal sense, to the point where he deconstructs them down to their separate body parts, finding each one just as arousing in a vacuum as he does combined into a whole package.
Aki is keen to escape at first but eventually relishes in the power she seems to hold over Michio sexually, which strains his relationship with his overprotective mother. Director Yasuzo Masumura takes a more ambiguous approach with Aki's characterization, leaving her motivations mysterious and wishy-washy. It does seem as if she craves the validation that Michio gives her so freely, but suffers greatly by letting herself become absorbed into his skewed outlook on life. The third act of this film will feel familiar to those who have seen Nagisa Oshima's 1976 feature In the Realm of Senses in which obsessive lovers destroy themselves with their sexual hunger. Blind Beast takes a darker, more gruesome approach with our ill-fated couple investigating S&M practices with no safety nets.
Blind Beast is a fascinating look at what can happen when two people go too far into the depths of tactile sensation and lose touch with reality.