Zigeunerweisen

1980 avant-garde B-movie

Rating: 17/20

Plot: An intellectual befriends a nomad who may have murdered a woman. They meet and, I believe, fall in love with the same woman. As the years pass, they may or may not get involved with each other's wives. They may even be the same person. If you've ever seen a Seijun Suzuki film, you'll know why I'm having trouble with this one. It's either difficult or I'm a complete idiot. Or both.

As expected, a stylized effort from Suzuki although it isn't the same stylization that made those oddball 60's films (Branded to Kill and Tokyo Drifter) so brilliant. This is so slow moving and so completely Japanese, and it sort of sucks you in, forces you to look around its meticulously-constructed strange new world, and almost hypnotizes you, setting you up for a knockout ending. It's chaos unfolding in slow motion. There are surreal touches (crabs emerging from the private parts of a woman washed up on a beach, all of the characters in the film watching a fireworks show that doesn't seem to exist, rocks falling onto the roofs of houses), but for the most part, everything seems realistic on the surface. Beneath that surface, however, is an entirely different matter. This sort of hit me like a Japanese David Lynch movie. As a matter of fact, the opening scene is a close-up of a record playing (the song is the title of the movie) during a creepy conversation between unseen characters (a conversation that is perfectly duplicated later on) which reminded me of Inland Empire. I believe Suzuki's modus operandi is to keep things open to interpretation; in fact, I think I remember reading something about how he doesn't even want to understand his own movies. In this one, he seems to be toying with the characters a little. It seems to me that the two main male characters might be two sides of the same protagonist, and I'm not sure how many actual female characters exist either, especially since one woman plays at least two different characters. The whole movie could be an allegory that has to do with a clash between East and West cultures. The intellectual and his wife seem more American/European; the wanderer and his wives and lady friends seem more Asian. And then they die or don't die. I'm sure it means something. And that's the beauty of this lovely, sometimes chilling, movie--it's the kind of movie that you can't stop running through your mind. It'll even force you to turn off the cd player in the car on the way to playing disc golf.

Note: This is considered the first of a trilogy (thematic or style rather than characters/plot) filmed after Suzuki was fired from his studio for not making movies correctly. I can't wait to see the others.

Me, directly after my cerebellum was extracted: