Radiance Films: Aesthetics of a Bullet (1973) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Radiance Films

Before making his first appearance via boutique label Radiance Films’ recent releases with 1974’s The Rapacious Jailbreaker and The Japanese Godfather Trilogy made between 1977 and 1978, maverick Japanese Toei stalwart and film worker Sadao Nakajima unveiled an overtly punk-rock oriented yakuza epic with his 1973 film Aesthetics of a Bullet.  A film which experienced difficulty securing financing before Nakajima turned to Art Theater Guild which financed Yukio Mishima’s Patriotism.  Restored in high definition by Toei Films and presented in its original scope 2.35:1 widescreen aspect ratio with plentiful extras, Aesthetics of a Bullet represents a different kind of yakuza film about the gulf between yakuza swagger and the actual ability to follow through with pulling the trigger of a gun. 

 
Lowlife Kiyoshi Koike (Tsunehiko Watase of The Rapacious Jailbreaker) is a good for nothing street vendor who sells rabbits for cash and lives with his girlfriend whom he picks on and blames for their financial woes in between drowning his sorrows in alcohol.  One night on the town, he is cherry picked by another yakuza gang in order to start up controversy in adjacent enemy terrain.  While himself not necessarily a yakuza at heart, Kiyoshi enjoys the newfound swagger of strutting about in yakuza outfits smoking cigarettes and brandishing a gun.  He also sleeps around quite a bit with increasingly aggressive sexcapades with women who pass through his arena and at one point he interrupts the gang rape of a young wealthy woman engaged to be married.  All of this starts to come to a head when his dreams of big timing in the yakuza underworld are met with the prospect of murdering another person as well as trying to make his war mark in a scenario that’s beginning to do away with violence.

 
A character study of a poor man who gets his first real taste of mobster life who gets caught up in the energy of the yakuza way, further loses his sense of self and seems to head downward while the film frequently juxtaposes recurring images of the rabbits he fed at the beginning of the film.  Implying the Japanese farm way of life will always flourish and outlive the fast laners in the yakuza, there’s also a critique of how victims of yakuza violence also outlast their captors.  Take for instance the engaged fiancée who is being sexually assaulted by three men with Kiyoshi trying to sneak a peek, contemplating joining in, before playing up the role of conquering rescuer hero in fighting off the assailants.  Later in the film, she carries on with her marriage unabated while his “rise” within the yakuza faction doesn’t seem to go much of anywhere.  She presses onward while he’s still trapped in a status quo of sorts. 

 
Between the film’s slick scope cinematography of modern Japan lensed by the legendary Toshio Masuda who himself became a director later and featuring an abrasive rocking and rolling punk-rock soundtrack of songs by Brain Police co-authored by Ichiro Araki, out of the gate Aesthetics of a Bullet is a cutting-edge film with attitude.  Co-authored by Disney’s Eight Below screenwriter Tatsuo Nogami with sharp sometimes hyperkinetic editing by Isamu Ichida, Aesthetics of a Bullet while a yakuza actioner in form plays in practice like a nonjudgmental character study of disaffected poor youth falling in with the wrong people and getting too big for his britches in a short amount of time.  Much of the film’s energy comes from Tsunehiko Watase who imbues the young yakuza with ego, pride, avarice and self-destructive vices.  A little bit like a Kinji Fukusaku portrait of a yakuza unraveling all by himself, Aesthetics of a Bullet achieves a lyrical quality with its montages of Watase running from other yakuza or the law set to Brain Police raging away on the soundtrack.

 
One of, astoundingly, six films directed by Sadao Nakajima that year including The Kyoto Connection and Girl Boss: Escape from Reform School, Aesthetics of a Bullet came and went without much discourse despite openly predating the arrival of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver by three years.  Regarded as a previously thought-to-be-lost pearl of yakuza cinema and an integral work of its director Sadao Nakajima and his leading man Tsunehiko Watase, the film comes to Radiance Films in a newly restored limited-edition collector’s set.  Replete with a collector’s booklet of essays and an archival interview with Nakajima, a video interview with Kazuyoshi Kumakiri and appreciation by Robert Schwentke and the time-honored OBI-spine and reversible sleeve art, Radiance have once again landed a home run with this world Blu-ray disc premiere.  Fans of Japanese, Asian cinema or completists of the Radiance Films spine numbers will most certainly want to buy this with confidence!

--Andrew Kotwicki