«El film yakuza inicial, y uno de los que colaboró a formar el género Toei. Un joven matón va por mal camino, desde las apuestas hacia cosas peores. Basada en una historia de Shintaro Ishihara, con mucha retórica y banda de Toru Takemitsu. El punk es Ryo Ikebe y su chica es Mariko Kaga» ["Cien años de cine japonés", de Donald Richie]
He de reconocer que no entiendo ni una palabra de este texto [¿el "punk"?
]... Para mi que está traducido de pena [como todo el libro, intuyo...], pero bueno, estamos ante una de las grandes películas del cine de yakuzas.
«Often described by critics as one of the greatest yakuza films ever made, Masahiro Shinoda's Pale Flower combines a stunning visual style with the sort of aesthetic fatalism that recalls his masterpiece Double Suicide (1969). Yet it almost did not get released. Screenwriter Ataru Baba decried the final work as a "nihilistic film" and tried to get it shelved. The ensuing dispute resulted in Shochiku Studios' delaying distribution for nine months. Indeed, much of the studio heads' consternation resulted from Pale Flower's being such a bold reworking of firmly entrenched clich้s of the yakuza genre. Though the protagonist is presented as an honorable warrior in a sea of intrigue and corruption, the film is imbued with an existential longing for the abyss. Murakami clearly recognizes that his final sacrifice for his clan is absurd but he goes through with it all the same. Set against the forbidding rationality of modern Yokohama, Shinoda's characters irrationally sacrifice themselves for beauty and aesthetic purity instead of more crass concerns like material gain. Stylistically, Shinoda subordinates plot for the film's murky, subterranean mood, aided by Masao Kosugi's sumptuous cinematography. During the opening scene at an illegal gambling parlor, Shinoda brilliantly sets up the dynamics between the film's various personalities with remarkable economy and little dialogue save the dealer's monotonous cant. Pale Flower is a bleak yet strikingly beautiful yakuza classic, made by one of the masters of the Japanese New Wave.» [
Van vdo. collection]
