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Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable , 1973. Directed by Shunya Ito. Meiko Kaji, Mikio Narito, Reisen Lee, Yayoi Watanabe. Female Prisoner Scorpion: Grudge Song , 1973. Directed by Yasuhara Hasebe. Meiko Kaji, Masukazu Tamura, Yumi Kanei, Hiroshi Tsukata. By a strange quirk of shipping, I got the fourth Female Convict Scorpion movie before I got the third. The first three films in this series were directed by a guy named Shunya Ito, whose aesthetic sensibility created what you might get if you crossed Caged Heat with Noh theater. The first three films are ambitious, manufacturing legitimate art from the despised women in prison sub-genre. The fourth film, Female Prisoner #701: Grudge Song, directed by exploitation genre veteran Yasuhara Hasebe, not only has no aspirations beyond exploitation thrills, it doesn't have even the slightest understanding of what made the first three films tick. In the Ito movie, our heroine--the wrongly imprisoned Matsu, or "Scorpion"--is transformed into an avenging angel. Actress Meiko Kaji cuts an imposing figure as the black-clad Matsu, speaking barely a word in each movie. Hasebe "gets" this, and contrives a number of set-pieces in which Kaji gets to glare menacingly at the camera, as she does in the other three movies. But context is everything. In the previous movies, Matsu bears the weight of a whole slate of wrongs done to her and to women in general. She's a vaguely messianic figure, whose vengeance is fully justified. Hasebe hasn't grasped this. His idea of Matsu is as a kind of distaff Man With No Name, and he blunders badly by making Matsu complicit in crimes that have no legitimate rationale as justified vengeance. Because of these crimes, Matsu is transformed from an exterminating angel into a something evil, and a banal kind of evil to boot. It doesn't help that Hasebe's idea of style is to ape Kinji Fukasaku's yakuza movies. Only once does he try to match Shinya Ito's theatrical sensibility, in a sequence that is so nonsensical and so badly edited that even an alert viewer will be scratching his head at what he or she just saw. This is the sort of thing that can't be laid at the feet of the writers, or the cinematographers, or even the editors. This is the director's fault. And all of the lacerating glances Meiko Kaji throws at the camera can't help it. All of which made the third film, Female Prisoner #701: Beast Stable, made the very same year, all the more remarkable. Nothing makes a movie seem more like a masterpiece than watching a pale imitation of the same film. Even more striking is the difference between this film and its two predecessors. Ito had a fraction of the budget he had for the first two films, but retained a ferocity of imagination that enabled him to substitute startling location shots for the theatrical tableaux of the previous installments. The result is no more realistic than the first two films--it is, in fact, just as abstract--but it is markedly less theatrical. The story here finds Matsu trying to survive while on the run as a hunted fugitive. The movie opens with a bang, with Matsu severing the arm of the cop who has handcuffed her in a subway and running through the city dragging the arm along with her. Once safely away from capture, she is plunged into the world of Japan’s poor women: sweatshop workers, prostitutes, abused wives. The movie makes a point of demonstrating that even without the walls of a prison, these women are all prisoners of one kind of male exploitation or other. As in the first two movies, Matsu becomes an avatar of female rage. Unlike the others, she actually forms friendships and seems to suffer emotional hurts from her actions. My favorite shot in the movie is also one of the most mundane, in which Matsu stands on a bridge over the railroad tracks sharing a drink with Yuki, the prostitute who has befriended her. There is a deep sadness in this shot that seems a tidy summary of the intended mood of the entire film. Like the previous installments, this film is some kind of masterpiece.
5/25/2007 |