Radiance Films: A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness (1977) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Radiance Films

After his 1967 film Branded to Kill successfully got him fired from Nikkatsu and thus blacklisted for another ten years in film, Seijun Suzuki after a decade long hiatus made his grand return to the director’s chair for Shochiku’s 1977 absurdist satire A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness.

Originally adapted for the screen by Atsushi Yamatoya from a popular manga by Ikki Kajiwara and something of a precursor to the sensory overload and insanity of Darren Aronofsky’s mother! sprinkled with hints of Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy and the German shocker The Fan, Suzuki’s first film since Branded to Kill picks up right where he left off with his crazed and wild departure from Nikkatsu.  One of the last Suzuki efforts to be filmed in anamorphic widescreen, this tightly constructed pressure cooker is at once sexy, frightening and sardonically somber as its director unleashes outright pandemonium and chaos across the silver screen.

 
Professional model Reiko (Yoko Shiraki) is in the process of being groomed by the editor of a golf fashion magazine to being a newly trained professional golfer, garnering the approval of her manager Miyake (Yoshio Harada the hero of Zigeunerweisen) and quickly catapulted to superstardom.  Soon everyone wants a piece of Reiko who is a hot new sensation unafraid of doing nudity and/or sexualized poses for her editor’s big budget sports promotion.  

However, things are complicated when she and her manager are driving home at night and he strikes a female pedestrian with her car.  Rather than report the incident, Miyake drives off insisting they don’t let anything derail her ascension to fame.  Soon after the woman who announces herself with a cast on her leg as Kayo Senba (Kyoko Enami) and it becomes apparent she has been plotting to throw herself into the path of Reiko’s vehicle to start a pattern of blackmail and threatening domination that engulfs the lives of Reiko and Miyake. 

 
Featuring a sneaky cameo by Branded to Kill star Jo Shishido as a cop trying to make sense of the madness that is beginning to take shape around Reiko and Miyake who tries to use his masculine bravado to fend off the sea of fans besieging her home, A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness starts off sneakily quiet before ballooning into an outlandish and outrageous satire.  At once a character study of two women inextricably linked to fame and fortune and a social satire with a mass of followers flocking and clinging to Reiko and her home almost like wild animals in the throes of feeding, Suzuki’s film is quite literally firing on every cylinder.  

Featuring surreal shots lensed gorgeously by Masaru Mori of houses and trees laughing, cuckolding, children rebelling against their parents and people invading private properties, sterile brutalist architecture and maybe the most scathing example of corporatist satire predating Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop, the feeling one has after awhile of Suzuki’s bonkers madcap epic is that of being beaten up.  Oh and the jazzy rock score by Keitaro Miho and Ichiro Tomita is pitch perfect soundtrack composition for the film, echoing the Zither sound of Anton Karas’ legendary score for The Third Man.

 
Wild, sexy, sardonic and fully engaged with the viewership, A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness is a splendid saga of audiovisual sensory excess and overload.  At once a story and an experience as litmus test with a sense that anything and everything can happen onscreen, Suzuki’s grand return to the director’s chair was sadly poorly received upon initial release in Japan.  A critical and commercial flop, the film nevertheless did rank at number 18 for the best film of 1977 by the Japanese periodical Kinema Junpo.  

Some critics who look at the grassroots success of Zigeunerweisen which engaged with Suzuki’s surrealism even more deeply regard A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness as something of an intermediary film tracking his departure from Nikkatsu and blacklisting towards his eventual full embracement of his aesthete.  While that might be debatable, what is here from Seijun Suzuki represents his best if not his only film of the 1970s in a movie that seems to crank up the volume with the chaos and excesses that erupt across the screen.

--Andrew Kotwicki