Eclipse Series 28
THE WARPED ONES
Akira’s life is
fueled by American Bebop Jazz, sex and alcohol, while trapped in a sweltering
tempest of a slum-ish existence without regard to the future. Director
Koreyoshi Kurahara embraces this juvenile delinquent and takes the camera into
the frenetic and motionless moments of his grim and sweaty world, where rape
and love are equitable exchanges as both become improvised and dissonant.
The story
revolves around Akira and is told entirely from his viewpoint. Like Alex
DeLarge from Kubrick’s masterful A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, Akira’s anarchic lifestyle
of narcissistic consumption include the love of music, rape, and ultraviolence.
Akira also shares the latter’s use of poetic vocal expression but instead of
slang he grins, hoots, howls, and utilizes his voice as a musical instrument as
his face contorts like a rubber mask. Where Kubrick depicted his anti-hero with
a very rigid and beautifully modernistic style, here Kurahara slings his camera
into frantic motion; often moving much faster than the 24fps can capture
resulting in a blurring and surreal mosaic of flesh and forgery. The opening
credits of freeze-frame pugilism charge directly into the story as Akira is
caught in a plot to pickpocket an American who is attempting to pick up his
prostitute girlfriend. Kurahara shoots this in one continuous shot as the
camera not only moves…but flows with the blaring jazz percussions thrumming
underneath the images. Akira is caught by a local reporter and the story
becomes a tale of retribution and instant gratifications. Welcome to the Sun
Tribe!
The literal
translation of the title is SEASON OF HEAT which carries multiple implications.
Kurahara often captures Akira is sweaty close-ups, powerless against the raging
heat in his dilapidated flat. But the title also alludes to the delinquent
lifestyle as the police are always a step behind Akira, turning up the heat. Of
course the rising sun is the national symbol so to depict it as torturous and
omnipotent, the characters very existence a mere whim to its life giving (and taking)
anomalies is rebellious. But the International title also carries its own
ambiguities as THE WARPED ONES may refer to Akira and his cohorts and their
avant-guard lifestyle but also his victims who prove themselves equally
unsettling.
Akira’s violent
rape of a totally innocent Devotchka (sorry wrong film) leads to the story’s
central conceit: the comparison of a middle-class couple (the reporter and his
girlfriend) to the lower depths (Akira and his prostitute cohort Fumiko) of
society. As the narrative develops with a racing, nervous energy it becomes
apparent that the distinction between social classes is a matter of superficial
appearances; the victim soon becomes victimizer as masks are eventually
stripped away. In a society where “losing face” is worse than death, Akira
never pretends to be anything other than he is naturally, while the reporter
and his girlfriend still hide behind their carrion facades.
Swapping partners
becomes the logical deduction as Akira and Fumiko’s laughter throttles the audience
from complacence. The final freeze-frame image zooms into Akira’s open mouth as
he and his kind swallow the world whole.
Final Grade: (B)
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