Yasuzo Masamura

[Tod Booth]

I recently saw a few of these at the PFA in Berkeley, and they were all
fantastic. Here's a review I wrote about the series in the SFWeekly, FYI:

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Clear your Saturday night schedule for the next few weeks and discover the
lost, legendary director Yasuzo Masumura at the PFA. You've probably never
heard of him, but he's credited with inspiring Japanese New Wave directors
like Nagisa Oshima with his rejection of sentimentality, and embrace of
contemporary themes and techniques. His career seems to have ended doing
S&M features (though even his S&M films are highly regarded among those
that savor the stuff) and anonymous yakuza series films, but his heyday
from late '50s to early '70s produced an extraordinary string of films
ranging from high school drama to industrial espionage to kids on the run.
Many of his films manage to be both fully functional genre pictures as well
as thoroughly ironic subversions of them. The PFA's rather stodgy program
notes give barely a hint of the wild-ass nature of these films. *Manji*
(Oct. 4), a torrid Polanski-esque psycho-drama about a demure housewife who
starts wearing the pants in her household when she falls head-over-heels in
love with another woman, sports the most hair-raising scene I've seen all
year (and this year has seen Cronenberg's *Crash*, Lynch's *Lost Highway*,
and the Fassbinder retrospective at the Castro and PFA) which involves a
blood pact between the housewife and her girlfriend's fiance (the husband
even gets in on the action eventually) and the immortal subtitle, "You suck
mine first."

The best place to start would be with this weekend's *The Build-Up* (Sept.
13), also known as *Giants and Toys*. A merciless satire on consumerism and
the advertising industry, it follows three candy companies as they prepare
their new lines of caramels, while spending even more time trying to
discover the other companies' secrets. Indeed, the whole city seems to be
interested only in caramels and what new gimmick each company is going to
include. Will it be space suits this time, or a real live animal in each
package? The rollicking dialog is pure Hawksian screwball comedy, and
Hitomi Nozoe, as the ghetto girl with a mouthful of spectacular cavities
who becomes the spokesmodel sensation for one of the companies, is the
Reese Witherspoon of her time. After *The Build-Up*, you'll probably be
hooked, so don't miss *Afraid To Die* (Sept. 20), starring Yukio Mishima as
a swaggering but chicken-hearted yakuza who'd rather stay in prison than
face the dangers of the street. The other series highlight for me is *Play*
(Oct. 11), a gritty, gorgeous portrait of a teenage ghetto couple (both
virgins) who fall in love while on the run from a yakuza boss who intended
to deflower the girl himself. This one'll give you a taste of some of
Masumura's semi-exploitation work in it's brutal, bizarre violence and
over-amped acting, but the teenage stars, Keiko Sekine and Masaaki Daimon,
and their reckless
*amour fou* are guaranteed to break your heart.

tb

tb