Heat Shimmer Theater (1981)

Directed: Seijun Suzuki

Based on a story by Kyoka Izumi - whose writings influenced a number of playwrights and filmmakers, particularly Kenji Mizoguchi - "Kagero-Za" is another wildly inventive installment in the jump-cut, luridly hued, crazy-quilt pantheon of Suzuki.

The fever-dream follow-up to his acclaimed "Zigeunerweisen", the enigmatically erotic "Kagero-Za" is the second film in Seijun Suzuki's Taisho Trilogy–this time set in the disjointed cityscapes and surrounding countryside of 1926 Tokyo.

Playwright Matsuzaki (Yusaku Matsuda) crosses paths with a beautiful woman on her way to the hospital who tells him a friend is dying. Frightened of a mysterious older woman who sells the fruit of the Chinese Lantern Plant - rumored to be distaff souls - she implores Matsuzaki to accompany her. At first he refuses, but later finds himself so obsessed with this luminous apparition that he wants nothing more than a life of carnality and excessive passion. Matsuzaki eventually follows a trail of messages left by his phantasmal enchantress across the country to Kanazawa - only to realize he is actually being lured to his own certain demise.

Heat-Haze Theatre, perfectly illustrates the ineffable sensuality and perverse randomness of Seijun Suzuki's late-period arabesque. The middle entry in the director's Taisho Trilogy, the wantonly eccentric narrative is set in 1926 Tokyo, though, given Suzuki's contempt for coherence, it might as well take place in another planet. Playwright Matsuzaki (Yusaku Matsuda) has a series of encounters with Shinako (Michiyo Ookusu), a strange woman who materializes one day on her way to the hospital, and who may or may not be the late wife of Tamawaki (Katsuo Nakamura), Matsuzaki's shotgun-toting patron. Just as the plot seems to be solidifying into a parody of Japanese ghost tragedies, however, Suzuki tosses in Eriko Kusuda as Tamawaki's wife, a geisha who resembles Shinako except for her habit of turning blonde and blue-eyed with the moonlight. Suzuki whips nutty yet genuine eroticism around an exposed ankle or soaking-wet hair, but it is the countless, casually inexplicable details—characters dropped into deadpan tableaux via jump cuts, boldly gratuitous changes of angle, raucous Jazz Age parties, and crushed bladder cherries—that assure us that the movie will be impossible to predict from shot to shot, let alone from scene to scene. Willfully obscure as it might be, Kageroza nevertheless sheds considerable light on the arc of Suzuki's career: Where the filmmaker's more famous '60s yakuza thrillers, made under studio contract, charge regular situations with a surplus of masculinity toppling over into hysteria, the Taisho films, shot with complete freedom, are oddly feminine, absurdist yet filmed with tranquil assurance.

IMDB

Awards

Also Known As (AKA):
- Kagerô-za (Kagero-za) - Japan title
- Heat-Haze Theatre - (undefined)








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