The question mark that hangs over Kiju Yoshida’s 1970 movie Heroic Purgatory is: is he joking? Is this a grand avant-garde modernist movie told in a deliberately non-narrative way, or is it Yoshida parodying the same, as if to pour scorn on an idea prevalent at the time – that you can’t break the bourgeois system using bourgeois tools?
Either way, whether he’s joking or being deadly serious, the one thing that will haul you from opening to closing credits nearly two hours later is Yoshida’s astonishing visual sense. This is a fabulously photographed movie full of stark, awkward, angular compositions shot in a high-contrast and often high-key monochrome, and it all takes place in high-modernist settings – computer rooms, nuclear power stations, concrete walkways and the like, to an atonal soundtrack of bleeps and Ligeti-like vocalising.
In the first of many feints, it opens in what looks like a scaled-down version of the Guggenheim in New York, where a young woman has soon fallen to her death from one of its spiralling ramps. Except Ayu (Kazumi Tsutsui) is not dead. In scenes that might be set in the past (which would explain it), she winds up very much alive in the apartment of Mr and Mrs Shoda (Kaizo Kamoda, Mariko Okada), which is soon visited by a man claiming to be Ayu’s father. This may or may not be true, but the young woman seems frightened of the man and, turning to Mr Shoda for comfort, she takes off her clothes, to Mr Shoda’s delight.
I say delight, but in fact no one betrays any emotion at all in this movie. The acting style is remote. There is no eye contact between the actors. Instead, in scenes often heavy with dialogue, they look past the camera, as if if Yoshida had painted a big X on a back wall somewhere and asked his actors to fix on that. (Incidentally, while Kamoda and Tsutsui are the most forceful presences in the film, neither of them ever appeared in another one).
The most animated sequences take part in what is probably 1952, where a group of radicals is plotting the kidnapping and assassination of a diplomat. They suspect one of their number is a spy, and while fingers point in various directions the group also falls out ideologically. It is this political fracture which echoes down the decades and which is possibly the point of the film. Yoshida slides back and forth without warning through the years, revisiting the group including the Shodas and Ayu in the 1960s, 70s and late 80s. No one seems to have aged, a lot of them are wearing the same clothes as they were years before. If there is a white-haired character, he/she will soon be whipping off a wig to reveal youthful dark hair beneath.
One other thing remains constant – the interminable political bickering. What little action there is happens in the past. The present and the future are the realm of recrimination, remembering and misremembering.
You can see Antonioni in here, in his modernist period at least – La Notte, in particular. The bourgeois-bashing of Buñuel, the anti-authoritarianism of Patrick McGoohan’s TV show The Prisoner, the disruptive time flows of Alain Resnais’s Je t’aime, Je t’aime. But even Antonioni at his most opaque (in L’Avventura, for example) is not as hard to fathom as Yoshida is here. The film forms one third of Yoshida’s trilogy on Japanese radicalism. I’ve not seen the other two – Eros + Massacre and Coup d’Etat – but by all accounts they are a lot easier to follow than Heroic Purgatory.
Is that title a hint that this is all a joke on Yoshida’s part? I suspect it is – the people we meet are not heroic, they are a mess. Their idealism is suspect and they don’t seem able to follow anything through, apart from a mutual mistrust of each other. They are locked in a purgatory of intrigue and an imperfect state of grace. As the film ends, Mrs Shoda and Ayu are at a railway station. Pretty much nothing has been achieved. Suddenly Yoshida’s camera focuses on a sign. It reads: “Dead End”. Radicals, huh.
For all its opacity – the disrupted timelines, the appearance of the wrong people at the wrong time, the withholding of emotion – it’s entirely fascinating, a true one-off, and so visually powerful that it actually doesn’t really matter what’s going on.
The Arrow release linked to below is the way to go if you want to check it out – 1080p digital transfers supervised by Yoshida himself. As said, I’ve only seen this third of it. It looks fantastic.
Heroic Purgatory (in box set with Eros + Massacre and Coup d’Etat) – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
