Reseñas de la crítica

Suzuki's explosive treatment of the crime genre assumes you understand the formula's conventions already: it dispenses with clear narrative continuity in favour of fragmentary impressions that are electrified by the film's formal style.

This movie has gone on to rightfully earn a reputation as one of the great Japanese films of the 60's, and has influenced some of our most treasured modern independent filmmakers, including Wong Kar-wai and Jim Jarmusch. While Branded to Killmay lack the emotional thrust of Suzuki's masterpiece Gate of Flesh, it more than makes up for that in anarchist spirit, which makes it an essential work by one of the strangest artists to ever pick up a camera.

The everything-but-the-kitchen-sink stylistic exuberance of Branded was the apotheosis of a process of ever-bolder experimentation that had been underway throughout much of Suzuki's time at Nikkatsu.

Like Tokyo Drifter, Branded to Kill can be seen as a visual achievement in the rich tradition of Japanese design. Shots are delicately composed for impact; realism and continuity are secondary. An example of this can be seen when animated butterflies appear on the screen to represent Shishido's obsession with Mari's character.

It's an absolute nightmare to follow the story, not because it's too complex (although, it is quite complex), but because Suzuki is constantly drawing your eye away from the drama with his lop-sided visual compositions, hysterical, foaming-at-the-mouth characters and spatially free-associative editing... It's something of a model in demonstrating the ways that potentially banal material can be super-charged with a few stylistic amends.

Suzuki's camera is as cool as a coiled panther, and his frames composed with the angular calm of an Ed Ruscha canvas, even as the film itself grows increasingly splintered and frantic.

What Nikkatsu wanted was a follow-up to the brassy pop-art hit Tokyo Drifter; what Suzuki delivered was a stark, spastically existential—and, most affronting of all, defiantly unmarketable—crime-flick abstraction that unfolds like the director's cracked self-portrait... An extraordinary sensory experience, Branded to Kill is also very much Suzuki's corkscrew vision of himself as a manic maverick ambushed by a ruthless, suffocating system.

[Suzuki] cheerfully omits virtually all the exposition: no scene-setting, no explanation of who the characters are, no explication of hit man Hanada's tactics or working methods. All such details are taken as given; Suzuki assumes that the viewer knows all this generic stuff already. This strategy leaves him free to pursue the visual coups and conceptual surprises that interest him, and, incidentally, to ridicule the aspects of the genre that bore him.

Flipping around the channels of late-night TV in my Tokyo apartment in 1984 I came across what seemed like a B movie from the '60s. The studio: Nikkatsu. The star: Joe Shishido. The director: Seijun Suzuki. I was not at all prepared for what I was about to see, and I remember spending much of the following hour or so riveted to the screen with my mouth open. That night changed my life and set me on a journey to explore the darker side of a culture known predominantly for its classical beauty.

Just as Shishido cracks up and enters a surreal nightmare world, so Suzuki breaks the film down into a bizarre but beguiling chain of absurdist, OTT, barely related elements. It looks a little like golden-age Godard (but far more stylish). The climax, oddly reminiscent of Point Blank (made the same year), shows how much further Suzuki was prepared to push even than Boorman, let alone Hollywood. Occasionally mystifying, but always witty, inventive and dazzling to look at.