Youth of the Beast

Youth of the Beast opens with the tranquility of two lovers in a languid embrace, which is quickly corrupted by trench coat-clad cops, who discover a note professing guilt in a murder-suicide. And so sets the tone of this classic Japanese Yakuza (gangster) B-film. Seijun Suzuki’s 1963 thriller moves through the moody world of gangster gunrunners and drug dealers, where violence, murderous impulses and sadistic perversions have no immediate foil; love and honour are only off-screen points of reference from sometime, somewhere else in a plot driven by revenge made all the more ominous by Suzuki’s highly manicured compositions. Like the film’s renegade anti-hero, Joji ‘Jo’ Mizuno, whose outward calm is a thin veneer for his capacity for calculated violence, the sleek world that Suzuki creates can, and will, reach a breaking point. Fans of Yakuza films, and of delirious, kinetic cult cinema à la Suzuki, will want to join us for this Kibatsu Cinema presentation of Youth of the Beast. B&W and colour, DVD, in Japanese with English softtitles, 92 mins.