Irezumi (Tattoo) may not be Yasuzo Masumura’s most famous movie, but it is one of his most emblematic ones. Masumura, an atypical and precursory film maker under contract to Daiei Japanese studio, studies for three years at the Centro Sperimenrale della Cinematografia in Roma. When he comes back to Japan in 1957, his stories of desire and asserted perversions pave the way to the New Wave of Oshima and Imamura. But he is still a studio film maker who sometimes has to be content with ridiculous conditions of shooting and learns to master them perfectly.
1966 is his most prolific year. He directs four movies, among which the famous Red Angel and the deliberately inflammatory Irezumi, an adaptation of two short stories written by Junichiro Tanizaki, a most important writer having shared Ozu’s path and his taste for the West. Masumura makes a diagnosis on Japanese society: overburdened with the ideological pressure of their modern governments, the Japanese have sacrificed their desires of their own accord. In Irezumi, young Otsuya is forced to work in a geisha’s house by unscrupulous men. As if she was under the influence of the spider tatooed on her back, she soon makes of her customers the victims of a revenge all the more devastating as it seems to be irrepressible, systematic, instinctive and with no selfish motives. The terrible beauty of the movie comes from a technicolor reduced to the red and black of the tatooist’s inks. Or also from its Cinemascope format which, for once, does not aim imposing panoramas, but at catching the lascivious and poisonous lying body of Ayako Wakao, with whom Masumura had a tempestuous relationship and made his greatest movies.

Retrospective at the French Cinémathèque from August 22nd to October 14th.
Available in a set released by Ciné Malta, along with The Blind Beast.
Also available are Seisaku’s Wife and Passion.

Antoine Thirion.