Double Suicide (Masahiro Shinoda, 1969) (Patreon)

BY REQUEST: Alex

It's always a pleasure to catch up with an as-yet-unseen classic from the Japanese New Wave. These directors tend to exhibit a formal approach that I find rigorous and seductive, mainly because the radical anti-illusionist cinema that was in vogue at the time is much more organic in these films than in so many others. That's of course because classical Japanese theatrical aesthetics dovetail so nicely with the Brechtian techniques that were gaining traction elsewhere at that time.

Double Suicide is almost a textbook example of how to wed those traditions to the cinema. While this isn't the first Shinoda film I've seen -- I saw his 1995 film Sharaku at the San Francisco Int'l Film Festival in March of 1996 -- I nevertheless feel as if this is a fresh encounter with a director who hasn't received enough of my attention. Double Suicide isn't perfect, but it manages never to be less than compelling. There's just so much going on.

Shinoda's film is an adaptation of the 18th century bunraku play The Love Suicides at Amijima by renowned Japanese playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon, and for the first ten minutes or so, Double Suicide shows puppeteers working with their puppets, setting up blocking and sets, and even has the voice of Shinoda on the phone with a collaborator making plans for mounting the production. Then, we get a glimpse of the two main characters, Jihei (Kichiemon Nakamura) and Koharu (Shima Iwashima) lying dead together under a bridge. Shinoda is making a live-action film but he has firmly encoded the production as an extension of bunraku puppet theater, suggesting that we should regard these actors as puppets of a sort, bound by fate, their agency limited.

The overt theatricality of Double Suicide is in fact deliberately organized for the camera, and so when the settings (the brother, Jihei's home / paper shop) feel claustrophobic, it's by design. And at key moments, Shinoda explores exteriors (the bridge, the graveyard) that, while also quite evidently stage sets, afford the film an expansiveness that signifies the promise of escape. That's to say, by working on a soundstage, Shinoda has far more control over the spatial rhetoric of the film.

I will admit to having gotten lost a few times in the plot twists and reversals of fortune, and this may be due to the fact that Shinoda assumes a viewer who is familiar with Chikamatsu's play. Still, there are developments and decisions that struck me as awkwardly presented, especially the second-act revelation that Jihei's wife Osan (also played by Iwashima) had made a pact with Koharu. But this was interesting rather than frustrating, because when these characters' behavior departs from the expected -- my notions of human nature, passion, revenge -- I took Shinoda's abrupt maneuvers as intended to dramatize for the modern viewer the ways that the codes of conduct in the Edo period differ from those of Western societies of the era. In other words, the play has the outward trappings of Shakespearean drama but proceeds by very different rules.

Probably the most obvious formal element that Shinoda brings from Japanese theater is the use of kuroko, the black costumed stagehands who move throughout the action. This is an impressive decision because, rather than bringing a different visual vocabulary to the film, their presence insures that the contemporary viewer can never lose themselves in the drama. After all, on stage the kuroko are moving around in the background, while the action happens downstage. In Double Suicide, the kuroko come very close to interacting with the players, and frequently Shinoda shows their veiled faces reacting to what we're watching, like a muted Greek chorus.

If I had any difficulty with Double Suicide, it's probably to do with the film's emotional register, which is often in conflict with the overall artifice. This is kind of an unfair complaint, since bunraku and kabuki are generally anti-psychological artforms. Still, there are moments like Jihei's breakdown over his treatment of Osan that seem to demand a level of engagement on the part of the viewer, even though we know these characters only by their situation. What drove Jihei into Koharu's arms to begin with? Why this courtesan as opposed to some other? Shinoda reads Chikamatsu as archetypal puppetry, a manipulation of objects, and this tamps down any direct emotional appeals.

But I have to say, these discordant moments in Double Suicide are probably a me problem, since I am not familiar enough with the history of the Japanese theater to recognize where he is sticking close to the tradition and where (if at all) he is diverging from it. But as frustrations go, that's a good one to have, because it is just an opportunity for further learning.