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Rating: When you watch a film by Takashi Miike, you already know that the experience will inevitably be delirious and out of your mind.
The latest Yakuza (First Love) is his most recent film among those distributed in Italy. Certainly not the latest in terms of time, from one of the most prolific directors ever. It's not even among his most extreme works, but it's one of those I loved the most, which I enjoyed the most.
Often, precisely because of the crazy and extreme nature of his works, it's not always easy to fully enjoy the Miike experience. A unique author in the contemporary landscape for productivity and the union of genres and styles even within the same film.
Author of works often complex and theoretical, like Iz;, of great provocation, like Visitor Q (in which he also cited Pasolini), a film that employed the grotesque to showcase the hidden aberrations of Japanese society and its taboos, such as pornography and incest. He paid homage to the spaghetti western tradition with a gem like Sukiyaki Western Django (featuring a memorable Tarantino cameo). He created an epochal cult in its genre (of great importance within Japanese horror) like Audition, a film that resonated widely even in the West. Paid homage to Kurosawa in 13 Assassins.
In general, he has often centered his work on the excavation of Japanese society and culture.
Together with Sion Sono, he is undoubtedly the most extreme and provocative Japanese director of today, also a child of the great revolutionaries of the Japanese nouvelle vague like Nagisa Oshima.
But the Yakuza is his true great love. The first love, indeed. From the times of Shinjuku Triad Society, through his perhaps most famous film, Ichi the Killer, up to this latest one in question.
The latest Yakuza is a wonderful and extremely fun work to watch (there's even space for an animated glimpse, a bit like the one in the latest Wes Anderson production, The French Dispatch), which depicts the twilight of an ancient world, like that of the Yakuza, between cinematic myth and global modernity. The passage of time and the end of traditions are themes already tackled by Miike, the social changes in Audition concealed monsters of loneliness and horror.
In this case, despite everything, there is room, at the end of the carnage, misery, greed, and the twilight of honor, for a note of positivity and poetry.
Particular note for Becky, stage name of Rebecca Eri Ray Vaughan, an Anglo-Japanese actress and a very well-known figure in her homeland, who here plays the most over-the-top and delirious character. A gem. An unmissable film.
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