Sai Yoichi: Wide Angles
Tony Rayns
It’s not hard to make a case for Sai Yoichi as an auteur director and as a major figure in modern Japanese film. He’s the current chairman of the Directors Guild of Japan, and he has 17 features and a short film to his credit; obviously, he’s ‘Big in Japan’. And he’s had a long-term association with two of his finest contemporaries, Oshima Nagisa and Kitano Takeshi: he got his career break when Oshima invited him to work as his assistant on In the Realm of the Senses; Kitano made a cameo appearance in Sai’s first film, Mosquito on the Tenth Floor, and much later starred in his phenomenal bio-pic about a notorious Korean-Japanese criminal, Blood and Bones. Sai and Kitano even acted together as the leaders of the Shinsengumi samurai militia in Oshima’s last film, Gohatto. So why isn’t Sai as well known internationally as Oshima and Kitano are? Why is this IFFR programme the first-ever survey of his work in the Western world?
The short answer is that we haven’t been paying attention. Sai was born in 1949 in Nagano Prefecture, to parents who had immigrated to Japan from North Korea. His Korean name is Choi Yang-Il. Japanese society is not noticeably welcoming to any immigrant community, but Koreans come in for more stick than most, despite the popularity of a handful of Korean-Japanese in showbiz and sports. Sai has been relatively lucky in that he chose to work in a field where anti-Korean prejudice is minimal, but he’s as conscious as any other Korean-Japanese of the discrimination and hostility faced by many in their community. He tackled the issue head-on in his 1993 movie All Under the Moon (it was first made as a 40-minute film for satellite TV, then expanded to feature length) and found that he had changed the course of his career – and not only because he won most of the prizes for Japanese cinema that year. The protagonist of All Under the Moon is an easy-going Korean-Japanese taxi driver who falls for a Filipina girl from the bar run by his mother. His racial troubles bring the predicaments of all the losers and loners in Sai’s earlier thrillers into a new perspective. From 1993 on, Sai’s films are almost all explicitly about what it means to be a marginalised individual in Japan.
Sai, however, is not a bleeding-heart liberal. He’s not interested in characters who wallow in self-pity or who secretly enjoy victimhood. He’s into characters who fight back, whether they’re Korean-Japanese, Okinawans, blind men or renegade ninja. His early films earned him a reputation as a ‘hard-boiled’ director – the advertising tagline for Let Him Rest in Peace, in which a man returns to a seaside backwater to right a longstanding wrong, was ‘Boil Up Hard!’ – and he has never done sentimentality. Japan has its share of soft Leftie directors, some of them members of the dear old Communist Party of Japan, as conservative an institution as you could ever wish to avoid. Sai has no political affiliations or agenda, but his sense of what it means to be at the bottom of the social hierarchy is as sharp as Oshima’s or Imamura’s, and as rebellious.
At the same time, Sai is an acid test for auteurism, because his films in no way resemble each other in tone, form or visual style. He learned early (perhaps from Oshima’s example) that a ‘consistent personal style’ is a chimera. Each story he tells defines its own tone, demands its own form, commands its own rhythm and style. Again, there are plenty of other directors in these post-studio-system times who take whatever work they can get and tailor their supposed ‘personal vision’ to whatever their producers expect. But Sai is not like that. He tackles only subjects that catch his interest and engage him intellectually and emotionally and, like Oshima, he thinks each of them through cinematically. This makes each film distinctive and powerful. When seen together, do they add up to a clear picture of an author’s concerns and personality? You decide.
One thing all of Sai’s films do have in common is a preference for wide-angle compositions. From the start of his career, he has used close-ups very sparingly – which means, amongst other things, that his films need to be seen on a big screen. Why wide-angle shots? I think it’s because he wants us to see his characters as he sees them himself: as figures in shifting relationship to each other, not as the self-sufficient loners they sometimes imagine themselves to be. This trait goes with his avoidance of unnecessary cutting. He holds his shots longer than most directors do these days, whether he’s framing a static, deep-focus composition (as often in Blood and Bones) or sending his camera on smooth, looping trajectories around his characters (as throughout Let Him Rest in Peace). Again, this allows us to see and weigh the balance of power between the characters, whatever their differences in socio-economic status, physical strength, gender or motive. When one character tries to challenge this balance of power, Sai’s compositions allow us to see and feel the dynamic of the challenge.
In keeping with his identification with Japan’s under-classes, Sai has a keen sense of anarchy. His most placid and ordered film is Doing Time, which is set entirely in a prison and centres on a man who (perversely?) achieves a kind of serenity. The early ‘hard-boiled’ films feature shocking spasms of violence, often arising in unexpected contexts or coming from characters who seemed least capable of it. It’s the anarchic sense that anything is possible which dominates Sai’s view of Okinawa in Via Okinawa and The Pig’s Retribution. Oshima and Imamura both saw Okinawa through Japanese eyes, dramatising the islands’ claim to an independent identity in terms of Japanese bafflement at Okinawa’s mysteries. Sai, by contrast, identifies with Okinawans precisely because they are not Japanese. He responds with delight to the seeming eccentricities of Okinawan behaviour and beliefs and feels no need to add a ‘mediating’ Japanese presence to the stories. And when he makes a film in Korea for the first time (it’s the revenge thriller Soo), he picks up the anarchic spirit in some recent Korean movies and runs with it.
Sai’s position as the most prominent ethnic Korean in the Japanese film industry has given him a unique advantage. He nowadays makes well-budgeted commercial entertainments, but his position allows him to give them an edge. No other director in Japan would have dared to mount a picture of Osaka’s Korean community as unflattering as the one in Blood and Bones, and few in the world would have chosen to take the path opened up by Hou Hsiao-hsien by using one man’s biography as the key to a much larger social history. Equally, no other director in Japan would have approached Kamui, based on a ninja story that’s one of Japan’s most famous manga, as something more than a generic CGI blockbuster; Sai’s adaptation delivers thrills and humour but emphasises the motifs of hidden identity, betrayal and social ostracism. You get the picture? Sai’s wide-angle visions are something to see.