Dir: Vicente Amorim. With:
Masumi, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Toshiji Takeshima. 111 mins.
Cert: 18.
Jonathan Rhys Meyers has
turned up in some rum old places of late. He gave one of his best performances
as a Gestapo officer in the Norwegian drama The 12th Man,
largely overlooked here in early 2019. Now the roaming Irishman can be seen
playing second blade to the singer-actress Masumi in a streaming-bound teriyaki
Western set among Sao Paolo’s thriving Japanese community, the most populous of
its kind outside Japan.
Vicente Amorim’s film is
fundamentally an exercise in shifting fistfuls of tropes – and clichés: beardy
senseis, terse men named Takeshi, ambient Christopher Doyle lighting – halfway
around the globe for the heck of it. Reheated 10,000 miles from source, these
ingredients are presented medium-fresh; like street-cart fusion cuisine, the
film will fill a hole, if you have a particular hankering.
The plot binding these
elements together is self-consciously comic-book: its source is Danilo
Beyruth’s Samurai Shiro, a copy of which our heroine keeps close by.
Masumi’s Akemi is a yakuza turf war survivor smuggled away to Brazil, where she
works a market stall and fends off the local machos; Rhys Meyers the amnesiac
who walks out of a hospital facility with facial scars and a katana blade, and
becomes our gal’s most assiduous shadow.
While we wait to learn
whether that’s for good or ill, Amorim and cinematographer Gustavo Hadba paint
the screen with an appreciable, low-level style. Working on a budget some way
south of Kill Bill, they’re at least attentive to matters of
composition, finding rhymes between the landscapes of two distinct worlds. Even
as the plot takes a marked turn around the houses, dispatching Akemi to
discover a heritage we already know, the majority of Amorim’s images pop in
some way, and – without straining unduly – this director makes his kills count,
too.
From
Rhys Meyers’ full-frontal nude scene to the finale's mustard-yellow
jumpsuits and sententious speechifying (“the time of honour is over!”), it’s
all very knowing, and finally twenty minutes longer than the nimbler B-movies
everyone’s referencing. (This may be preferable to Kill Bill, arguably
one entire film too long.) Yet it’s been compiled with
enthusiasm, flashes of skill, and a certain devil-may-care cheek – an infusion
of newish blood for a film industry that’s been badly drained in recent years.
Yakuza Princess will be available to rent via streaming platforms from Monday.
No comments:
Post a Comment