Start over. Leaving the prison walls, unbroken and obscene, the former gangster authority of the middle hand of Gunya, in his native element. With a reorganized gang of blood yakuza, the recidivist is sharpened to turn around and start over. Once Gunya was part of one of the trump criminal Yokohama families Hamamura - the roof of the port crime industry, which took as allies the alien organization "Dai Tokai" from Tokyo - miscalculated. More corporate, more inventive in generating income and spheres of influence, the Dai Tokai manipulators sneakily and reversibly with the aim of seizing and directly controlling the sea docks, tactically played a game of “dog bites the dog” – pitted against the rival port gang Kohokuhai. The chain of command was broken, both bosses on both sides were littered, cash flows were lost, and the gang was broken up at the root – the kayuk! Gunya for courage, automatic in the blink of an eye received 10 years, 10 to 365, and the harbor passed under the wing of the Gi Tokai, who ate many dogs on this kind of business.
Having suffered a fiasco, chervonets a year later, tightly knit seven out of the yakuza business, sekut that there is nothing to catch in Yokohama, reel off the fishing rods and change the place of dislocation, throwing their bones, floats and claws in the promising benefits of the expanses of Okinawa, but there is no resort in the criminal trade, the air chronically smells of blood. In Okinawa, besides them, soaped, their own throats - like uncut dogs, an infested collection of local motley sons of bitches of the criminal world, who established influence and defending their native interests, who still lacked hanging mongrels behind their backs, outsider attacks of arbitrariness that go against their concepts; they sniff out, put their claws in their pockets, wave their weapons in front of their mouths, climb on the horn, flag territory.
“Sympathy for a Loser” is one of the final paintings of Kinji Fukasakaku at the stage of qualification in the studio system before a turning point in his career. Barely bound by film bosses hand and foot, the director will gain almost complete control over his subsequent projects and turn the entire genre of yakuza eiga on its head in the future, aestheticizing the gangster cinema of local bottling into an ultra-violent substantive form of the subgenre “jitsuroku”, winning the title of director of yakuza eiga No. 1. Kinji Fukasaku is a personality-figure director whose pictures about the yakuza look not only under the threat of losing the phalanges and little finger, they are made healthy, and this tape is no exception, although I expected more from it, because, you can say – at Fukasaka the dog ate, devouring his film language, chewing his film works. His film language is a game of images, types, close-ups, settings in the frame, mise-en-scene, their freezing, oblique angles, “Dutch corners”, from the top and from various points of view as a still and moving movie camera. Combining the subgenre elements of “ninke” and the future “jitsuroku” in the tape. Having drawn and combined in his style the features of German Expressionism, Hitchcock manner, French film school, American genre style, but his professional handwriting is in the academicity of Scorsese, these are the film institutes of Tarantino, formed the basis of world cinema, giving us the great honor to see his unique film works.
I still remember, a long time ago, I saw in a well-known film publication a short report on the past program of rare Japanese cinema at the Rotterdam Film Festival, which, among other things, talked about a retrospective of the unprecedented Kinji Fukasaka - the director about whom I did not hear then, did not know. And then cut into memory, those few screenshots from his films, among which was exactly from “Sympathy for the Loser” – where the hero in a strict suit, plus still bloody buds on the body, in a rack stretched from a through wound in the back, squeezes a bloody blade in one hand (see screenshots). All these things said that Kinji Fukasaku director standing and in his paintings generously expressive bulletproof session.
“Sympathy for the Loser” starts from the same places and piers of Yokohama as in his previous “Honor of the Clan Stained in Blood”, again with a symbolic breeze appears Tsuruta liberated, but still the movie has its contrast. In advance, I will say that the finals of both films are not a drop in a drop, but are still close in spirit, and I salute “Honor”. .." for choreographic spectacular cutting-cromsal sweep, with a cloud of deflated black chain dogs. Closer to the finale of “Sympathy for a Loser”, there is a pre-culmination roll call with “The Wild Bunch” by Sam Peckinpah – a fallen roast bird, which by the way he rubbed a surprise about the lips of a woman, and a quartet, but already a yakuza-kamikaze. Takeo Yamashita jazz-instrumental electrified properly. The film crew led by Fukasaka landed on Okinawa not by chance, American military bases were established on the island after World War II, and for enterprising yakuza it was a serious part of the income in the sale: prostitutes, drugs, gambling establishments, etc. Yes, and the expansion of star-striped visible to the naked eye. It was unusual to notice a flashing poster of a film with a special content of "Palaces of Montezuma" Halls of Montezuma by Lewis Mileston with Widmark. And “Sympathy for a Loser” and its Okinawan theme inspired Takeshi Kitano for Sonatine.
Koji Tsuruta is very good in the role of the head of the gang, Gunya is a mongrel not a miss, the architypal yakujishchi lives in him. Left without a boss-master, without a girlfriend-moss whom he was in love with without looking back, with which the trace was frozen, Gunya did not drift, he remained his loyal friends in the bandit past, the same notorious criminals who do not give in to danger as he himself, ready not to give the wood with his tail clenched, but to go to the forehead, with competent catch-up, fists-legs, kidneys and pain points, to the state of origami, not whinching to crush enemies for the sake of survival.
Fukasaka hid under the glasses, this vulnerable melancholy of Tsuruta, almost the whole film does not remove them and looks more serious, and in the costume he looks great, in majeure, with the sharpening “Now someone’s blood will be spilled.”
Fukasaku on Tsuruta wearing glasses: "Sometimes I thought when he played these characters his face looked a little too tender." I would like to make it look a little different, tougher sometimes.
Large-sized Tomisaburo Wakayama and striped Noboru Ando are also here in business. One plays a one-armed bandit (the hand is noticeable in some places), a protocol boron with a steep temper and with this look - to peel off the skin, scrape the meat, crush the bones. Another, modestly, but with his outstanding bill. And then the smell of fried, the operation continues – sailed! An old insidious acquaintance, "Dai Tokai," plows his greedy claws into the ports of Okinawa. Humiliated and insulted, Gunya and Ko are not going to give slack and tear claws, but sharpen knives, in the end, this pain in the ass, which wants to bite off more than chew - to hell with their dog!