Is
there a better way to start a film than by playing a vintage ten-inch phonograph
record? No, there isn’t. That is how Seijun Suzuki commenced his great comeback
masterpiece, but to make it even better, he has his characters discuss how an
audible bit of conversation on the classic Pablo de Sarasate recording was
initially considered a flaw but was eventually recognized as what made the
record so special. That disc will play a fateful but hard to explain role in
Suzuki’s digitally remastered Zigeunerweisen (trailer here), which screens
during the 2017 Japan Cuts Festival of New Japanese Film in New York.
All
the cultural tensions of the Taishō Period (1912-1926) can be found in Aochi
and Nakasago, former professors at the military academy, who have gone in very
different directions. Aochi (tellingly a professor of German) adopted western suits
and lives a life of middle class respectability. Nakasago still wears
traditional garb and lives a wild (almost feral) semi-nomadic existence. The
ex-colleagues reunite when Aochi happens along just in time to save Nakasago
from a lynch mob convinced he murdered the lover he led astray.
He
probably did it. He certainly admits it readily enough when he and Aochi stop
to enjoy some sake at a geisha bar. Rather boorishly, Nakasago insists a recently
bereaved geisha perform for them. Yet, both men will be strangely moved by
grieving O-Ine as she performs her hostess duties. Aochi will go back to his
modernized, luxury-indulging wife Shuko and Nakasago will follow a blind trio
of beggars who sing songs so ribald they would make Missy Elliott blush. When
they next meet, Nakasago has married Sono, a woman from a proper family, who is
a dead-ringer for O-Ine.
It
is highly debatable whether Aochi and Nakasago were ever truly friends, but
their fates are certainly linked and to some extent, each has the other’s
number. There are people in life you just can’t shake, for better or for worse—in
the case of Nakasago, it is most likely for the worse. Of course, the
doppelganger duo of Sono and O-Ine is also deeply archetypal. Zigeunerweisen is frequently surreal and
it eventually evolves into a literally haunted genre film, but there is
something universally relatable about its core
I-am-not-my-brother-from-another-mother’s-keeper relationship.
Yoshio
Harada gets to storm and rage as Nakasago, but it is Toshiya Fujita who injects
all the bile and arsenic as the tightly wound Aochi. Frankly, it is fascinating
to watch them dance around each other as they observe the rituals of
friendship. Naoko Otani also covers a great deal of ground as the forceful,
seductive, and ultimately spooky doubles, Sono and O-Ine. Michiyo Okusu is also
something else and then some as the privileged Shuko.
