Jean-Pierre Limosin’s work is still in progress. Each new film seems to be a conscious continuation of some previous research: to do that he always needs to jump from fiction to documentary and from one subject to another. That’s how Limosin overcame a period of doubt following his first three films, Subterfuge (co-directed with Alain Bergala in 1983), Guardians of the Night (1986) and The Other Night (1988), working on documentary with portraits of Abbas Kiarostami and Alain Cavalier for the French TV serial Cinéma, de notre temps, in order to come back to fiction with Tokyo Eyes in 1996, shot in Japanese with young local stars and a special guest, Takeshi Kitano –who will also have his portrait filmed in the same French TV serial one year later. Those are two films it’s impossible not to think about when watching Young Yakuza, Limosin’s new Japanese documentary he shot in Shinagawa neighborhood within the clan of M. Kumagai, a yakuza boss whose face first may frighten without its anxious words.
Between Tokyo Eyes and Young Yakuza, Limosin made Novo -a fiction of desire and amnesia with Anna Mouglalis in 2002- among others projects. For the DVD special features, Limosin went back to Japan to film Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki: on this occasion M. Kumagai first met him with the idea of filming his clan. As a documentary is often the place for a power struggle, Limosin didn’t brought this Godfather fan the film he expected, but on the contrary a very sharp description of a circle. The “young yakuza” is not him but Naoki, a recruit who doesn’t support the implacable ceremonial for a very long time and end up disappearing without further notice: a charismatic boy, whom softness and adaptability is strong enough to oppose the ancestrals yet shiny rituals of the mob. Naoki is not less charismatic than Tokyo Eyes hero. Later, Kumagai fell off his position due to the internecines infightings Limosin told us in his interview: the film foreshadows this fall by depicting the outside pressure on the clan more than the inverted movement -traditional in mob films from Hawks’ Scarface to Scorsese’s Goodfellas. That’s what makes Young Yakuza a precious film about Japan’s relation to its “mob” -a documentary fascinated by its subject without the need for Limosin to assist one way or another to the crimes it continues to perpetrate.

Bastien Hader