A friend of mine has two abbreviations he uses to categorize certain things he likes: VFM and OTT. The first is “Value for Money” — meaning, it was worth the investment not only of cash but time to watch it. The other is “Over the Top”, which I think speaks for itself: he, like me, gets a huge bang out of something that is willing to be absolutely heedless of critical boundaries to be entertaining. In that sense I’m reminded of that quote by Karlheinz Stockhausen that I come back to a great deal: I demand two things [of a composer]: invention and that he astonish me.
Manji is nothing if not astonishing. It’s a wild, lurid, outlandish slice of melodrama — and Japanese melodrama, no less, a country with melodramatic cinema that puts the most shameless American productions right out into the street. People reared on tamer, more conventional movies will find it a giant headache: they’ll watch with their mouths hanging open in amazement at the amount of manipulation being thrown onto the screen. Not just manipulation of the characters by each other, but manipulation of the characters by the director, the writer — and most of all, the thoroughly shameless manipulation of the audience. But if you go in looking for all that, you’ll get VFM in a thoroughly OTT way. It’s Tennessee Williams by way of Douglas Sirk, and if that isn’t hysterical enough for you, nothing is.
When bored housewife Sonoko takes up a painting class, she finds herself smitten at
first glance with Mitsuko, the model — who has some smittening of her own to do as well.
The title refers to the reverse-swastika design that is actually the symbol for Buddhism in Japan (the Nazi swastika revolves the other way), and serves as a sort of diagram for the bizarre four-way relationship the main characters find themselves stranded in. At first there’s Sonoko (veteran actress Kyoko Kishida), a bored housewife with no children and an uninteresting marriage. She takes up a painting class and is instantly smitten with fascination for Mitsuko (also-veteran Ayako Wakao), the model. Sonoko’s repressed background and lifestyle has no room for lesbian longings, but it isn’t long before the two of them are disrobing frantically in front of a mirror and pawing each other while Sonoko gasps “I hate you for your beauty! I hate it!”
It isn’t long before we realize that Mitsuko is a manipulator and a glory-hound, someone who hungers for attention so violently and unrepentantly that she will do absolutely anything to retain it. Sonoko’s husband (Yasuke Kawazu) doesn’t take long to figure out that something’s amiss, and is soon arranging counter-manipulations of his own to drive the two of them apart. And then there’s Kotaro (Eiji Funakoshi), Mitsuko’s own betrothed, a devious snake who forces Sonoko’s back against the wall all the more, and triggers off one round of total madness after another on everyone else’s part. Summarizing the final third of the film would be futile — it’s an improbable, outlandish whirlpool of plot machinations straight out of Gothic novels — but you can’t deny that everyone involved is at the top of their game here.
Manji may be shamelessly lurid, hysterical and improbably, but for those going
in seeking such things it delivers everything you could want and then some..
Manji has some fairly respectable credentials: it’s an adaptation (however loose) of Junichiro Tanizaki’s novel of the same name, written by veteran screenwriter and director Kaneto Shindo, and mounted sumptuously by director Yasuzo Masumura, probably the hippest and most provocative commercially-oriented director of the Fifties and Sixties in Japan. Masumura was also responsible for such madness as Blind Beast (the movie Jennifer Lynch copped from, ineptly, for her art-travesty Boxing Helena), Giants and Toys (something like the Japanese version of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?), and Afraid to Die. The last starred an amazingly ill-fitting Yukio Mishima as a tough-guy hitman, and also featured Wakao as his on-screen sweetheart; according to John Nathan in his biography of Mishima, scarcely a scene went by where Mishima didn’t slap Wakao around, tough-guy style — and wholly unscripted to boot. Masumura couldn’t reign him in; he lost his temper, bellowed “You like to slap her around so much, go ahead!” and left all of Mishima’s smarmy abuse in the final print.
One common complaint I hear from people who watch older movies is that they find them “unrealistic” — then they turn around and watch staged fictions like Big Brother or The Apprentice. I guess it’s a question of what you call realism, or what your appetites are. Manji makes no pretenses towards being realistic, psychologically or otherwise, but you might discover that’s not as big an issue as you would think. Especially not in a story this OTT.
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