Tomoko (Yûko Hamada) and her brother Minoru (Manamitsu Kawabata) are bad kids! They lie constantly and they cheat everyone they meet. But that’s okay for their parents, because they taught them how! Mom and dad, ex-soldier Tokizo Maeda (Yûnosuke Itô) and his wife Yoshino (Hisano Yamaoka), are a pair of slimeballs that have moved into the apartment that Tomoko’s lover Shuntaro (Kyû Sazanka) pays for. Joke’s on him because he thought he would have a little love nest just for he and Tomoko. [sad trombone]. And that’s just the beginning of Tokizo and company’s insane schemes of blackmail and chicanery. But has the Maeda family finally met their match in the form of Minoru’s calculating lover Yukie (Ayako Wakao)?
Movies about bad people can be tricky. It’s easy to make the viewer wants to grab a machine gun, jump inside the film, and start blasting away at the baddies. For me, that film would be The Crucible (1996). But it’s much better when I actually WANT to spend 90 minutes with the bastards. I want movie villains to be sexy, charming, or funny and the ones in director Yûzô Kawashima’s film called Elegant Beast (1962), manage to be all three; if not all at the same time. Sorry, Yûnosuke Itô, you’re not one of the sexy ones to me, you’re hot in your own way!
Stagey due to its origins as a stage play, Elegant Beast never feels stilted. The amount of work that went into making this film as dynamic and precise as it could be is pretty mind-blowing. This film gives me the joy of watching master filmmakers at work. For you fans of Japanese horror out there, writer Kaneto Shindô, who also penned the play this film was adapted from, would go on to both write and direct two masterpieces of the genre, Onibaba (1964) and Black Cat (1968). Cinematographer Nobuo Munekawa does a hero’s job of never letting this single setting film from ever getting stagnant.
The cast in Elegant Beast is just incredible. Yûnosuke Itô and Hisano Yamaoka are perfectly cast as the (Demented) Parents of the Year. Their cardinal rule for the house is simple: We don’t care if you cheat the world but bring the money home for the family. The way they spend the opening credit sequence staging their apartment to look poorer than they are is pure genius. And the ways that they stay one step ahead of everyone they’re ripping off is a hoot. Yûko Hamada, who I know best from The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch (1968), is as gorgeous as she is delightful to watch being oh so bad onscreen.
Elegant Beast is a lovely film about a bunch of assholes who rip off garbage people (aside from that one poor sap). It’s hard to make the Maeda’s out to be the villains when everyone in their universe just sucks! The setting is intentionally drab (a welcome explosion of color at sunset notwithstanding), but the characters are certainly not. The mix of neorealism and the surreal makes this clever and darkly humorous tale a real treat for Japanese arthouse fans. Sadly, Kawashima died at the age of 45, and we can only imagine what more great films might have come from this incredibly talented director.
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