City of Lost Souls City of Lost Souls Chimera/American Cinematheque/Vitagraph/Ventura 2000 / Color / 1:78 anamorphic 16:9 / 103 min. / Hyoryuu-gai, The Hazard City / Street Date December 31, 2002 / $24.98 Starring Teah, Michelle Reis, Patricia Manterola, Mitsuhiro Oikawa, Koji Kikkawa, Ren Osugi, Akaji Maro Cinematography Naosuke Imaizumi Production Designer Akira Ishige Film Editor Yasushi Shimamura Original Music Koji Endo Written by Ichiro Ryu from a novel by Seishu Hase Produced by Kazunari Hashiguchi, Toshiki Kimura, Yasuyoshi Tokuma Directed by Takashi Miike
	Reviewed by Glenn Erickson Savant has to admit to practically giving up on the action film in the last ten years. American films have become obsessed with special effects. The influence of Hong Kong cinema, with its wire work and glitzy two-pistol sideways gunplay ballets, does nothing for me. Add MTV cutting and high-fashion veneer, and I'll go see some old, slow film noir instead. So City of Lost Souls turns out to be a welcome surprise. It's a bizarre postmodern thriller with a unique style that refuses to follow trends. The expected violence is mixed with poetic visuals in a way that avoids art school predictability, and the action is brutal but not entirely nihilistic - some of it is genuinely funny. A score of cultures and languages are mixed together to create a fantastic crime world too bizarre to be real, and too human to be cold. I liked it - for the most part City displays a good attitude, and director Takashi Miike has both a good visual eye and a knack for springing pleasant surprises. Synopsis: Brazilian-Japanese gangster Mario (Teah) rescues his Chinese girlfriend Kei (Michelle Reis) as she's about to be deported from Japan. Desperate to escape, he hides in Tokyo's booming Japanese-Portuguese community (!) and seeks passage from the country from a Russian mobster. To meet his price, they hold up a bigtime drug deal between the Chinese Mafia and the local Yakuza. Ko (Mitsuhiro Oikawa) is the meditative leader of the Chinese gang, who is also in love with Kei; Fushimi (Koji Kikkawa) is a Yakuza sub-chief with ambitions. Mario, Kei and 'gaijin' pal Rikardo (Sebastian DeVicente) make a clean getaway, but score the drugs, not the cash. They struggle to find a way to sell the dope, while the two mobster gangs tear Tokyo apart to find them. Kushimi eventually locates Mario's weakness: he has an ex-girlgriend named Lucia (Patricia Manterola) who cares for a small, spiritually gifted blind child, Carla. The (vitally informative) liner notes on Chimera's DVD of City of Lost Souls offer a long list of genre influences that contribute to the film, but the novelty of the movie, at least to these eyes, is how it differs from anything I've seen. Yakuza films tend to dwell in alienation effects and dark ruminations about living by the inhuman loser's code. The lead Yakuza hotshot in this picture is a tearaway who massacres his own leaders and couldn't give a damn about his code, Giri or anything. Mario is less a spaghetti-Western icon, with his leather trenchcoat, than a folk superhero, the kind who can fall from a helicopter into an alley and walk out unscathed, and who rallies an entire community behind him through sheer charisma. He's more like those old Brazilian Cinema Novo heroes who stalk through the unjust selva righting wrongs with a machete and six-guns.  1 City of Lost Souls has two major virtues. The first are a score of pulpish characters that promote the fantasy idea that Japan is a cultural melting pot - at least at the underworld level. Foreigners, 'gaijin', have been an important part of Toho genre pictures ever since Harold Conway played stuffy Yankees in kaiju eiga pictures. City of Lost Souls defines itself by the freshness of of its diversity. Portuguese prostitutes ply their trade on the city streets, and a Russian crook arranges smuggling operations from a run-down office. Chinese mobsters operate with illogical ease amid a Japanese society. What becomes immediately apparent is that wild director Miike is using all of these cultures and ethnicities because of their historical relevance as Gaijin. Millions of Japanese have emigrated to Brazil, yes, but the Portuguese were the first Europeans on the nippon island, centuries ago. The Russians fought crucial colonial naval battles with the Japanese. And the racial-cultural competition between the Japanese and the Chinese has always been keen, to say the very least - the idea that a big Chinese gang could operate on Japanese soil veers toward the fantastic. The various pairings and antagonisms of Japanese crooks and cops against the Gaijin crooks is fascinating. The second virtue is Takashi Miike's visual style, which doesn't follow the cuisinart trend of fast and meaningless action cuts. It isn't subordinated to a music track, either - the lazy, MTV approach to action montage. There is plenty of violence, and some of it is cheerfully gratuitous, but it's used sparingly enough to retain its impact. Dulling overkill is the main problem problem with action movies right now, and is shared even by the glossy Gangs of New York. Miike trusts his eye sufficiently to let some actions play in medium and even longshot. The actual visual landscape is a bizarre mix, jarring enough to amuse but not so extreme as to alienate. Abstract flash cuts to some kind of spinning object are soon answered when it turns out to be a flying guillotine disc. Both lovers are introduced with visions of insects crawling on their naked bodies, and then morphing into tattoos. Cartoonish computer animation is used to portray a ridiculously comic cockfight - when the combatants loose their birds in the arena, the next half-minute resembles a bloody, hilarious Nick Park short subject. The characters are sketched just enough to allow us to care for them. Their angst isn't stoically existential, as in a Yakuza picture, or as operatically overdone as a John Woo bullets-'n-soap tale, with the result that we're actually encouraged to invest in their problems. When our heroes selflessly choose to return to the fray instead of take an easy escape, we can't help but side with them: their loyalty has resonance. The mystical nature of the little blind girl Carla is treated with just enough seriousness to avoid bathos. And the final confrontations between the gang leaders aren't elevated to cosmic significance, as in many a spaghetti-inflected martial arts story. City of Lost Souls isn't overly pretentious. Just about the only conclusion I don't buy from the disc's (again I say this) thoughtful liner notes is the inference linking City of Lost Souls to Film Noir, and specifically the ending. As well-done as it is, the ending is the most predictable kind of downer, attempting to take us to a level of seriousness that the movie hasn't earned. Hip, functional, fresh and multiculturally adventurous, yes, but equalling Out of the Past? No, with respect. Just about the only dull thing about this picture is its Anglicized title, which doesn't convey the spirit of its content. Hopefully my enthusiasm for a personal disovery makes City of Lost Souls seem exciting. A fresh experience is always a good thing, even if I've spent the last decade pretty much ignoring the new trends in action films.  2 Chimera's DVD of City of Lost Souls is a slick presentation. The enhanced picture has good color and the show is in perfect shape; and the English subs are good too. Extras include a welcome director bio, and an irreverent quiz game that penalizes wrong answers with foul-mouthed text insults. Why does Savant envision beer-drinking American gangbangers sitting around their stolen television, getting off on this? On the other hand, it was fun being creatively dissed by a DVD.  3 The attractive cover art and menus are further indications that the relatively new company Chimera is interested in quality, which we always appreciate when plunking down our money. Well done. On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, City of Lost Souls rates: Movie: Very good Video: Excellent Sound: Excellent Supplements: Behind the scenes footage, Escape from Tokyo game, Trailers, Takashi Miike bio Packaging: Keep case Reviewed: January 11, 2003 Footnotes: 1. Cinema Novo was an anarchist-revolutionary-poetic Brazilian genre of bloody, symbolic action films in the late 60s. Return 2. In Los Angeles, the male-oriented un-PC foreign action film should be called a Dennis Bartok. Bartok is an organizer and scheduler for the American Cinematheque, and some of his most popular festivals have been elaborate programs composed of scores of Japanese and Asian martial arts & crime films never screened in the U.S. when new. With their ultra-violence and alien sensibilities, they attracted a whole new group of 20-something film fans. City of Lost Souls bears a Cinematheque logo and is apparently part of their small but growing group of co-releases. Return 3. Jaspar Sharp's blurb touting Miike on the back cover is interestingly qualified: "From arguably Japan's premier visual sylist of the moment." This is like Roger Thornhill saying Eve Kendall is the 'most beautiful woman he's ever met ... on the train.' Maybe the person who chose that quote is the one who spelled Yakuza two different ways in the same paragraph. Return [Savant Main Page] [Savant Links] [Article Index] [Review Index] [Savant 5 Year Report] DVD Savant Text © Copyright 2007 Glenn Erickson Advertise With Us Review Staff | About DVD Talk | Newsletter Subscribe | Join DVD Talk Forum Copyright © MH Sub I, LLC dba Internet Brands. | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use