Format: DVD

Release date: 24 July 2006

Distributor: Yume Pictures

Director: Yasuzo Masumura

Original title Akai tenshi

Cast Ayako Wakao, Shinsuke Ashida, Yusuke Kawazu

Japan 1966

95 minutes

Revisionist accounts of the brutalities of war have become so legion in recent cinema that they now constitute something of a sub-genre in themselves. The most recent of these was the twin Flags of our Fathers/Letters from Iwo Jima project in which Clint Eastwood was supposed to have re-examined the heroic struggle respectively to take and defend a small but strategically placed island in the Pacific during the Second World War. Although avowedly ‘anti-war,’ it’s a liberal ploy to present the story ‘fairly’ from both points of view and in Flags of our Fathers the framing narrative of avuncular old men looking back at the horrors of war from the comfort of their middle-class living rooms envelops the whole enterprise in a Werther’s Original wrapper of cosy sentimentality. Throw in the story of the heroic Native American and the entire project basks in self-congratulatory worthiness.

The same can by no means be said of Masumura’s Red Angel, which is a much more perverse though, for very different reasons, no less conflicted account of the plight of a nurse from Tokyo working in a series of field hospitals in China during the 1939 Sino-Japanese war. Having a female protagonist might make us think that this is going to be a reappraisal of the hitherto undervalued role of women in modern conflict and although we are presented with the day-to-day details of her work it is by no means the focus of the film. Indeed it’s precisely what Masumura does with the genre of the war film that makes it so intriguing and from the title alone we should know that this nurse is not going to be your average Florence Nightingale.

The red angel in question is Sakura Nishi. We first encounter her as she is warned by the Head Nurse to be on her guard against the recuperating soldiers who will go to any lengths to avoid being sent back to the front. What she isn’t warned about is their pent-up sexual boredom and on a night-round she is lured by Sakamoto, a fellow Tokyoan, and raped by him whilst pinned to a sickbed by his ‘bored’ accomplices. So far this account doesn’t seem to have taken us out of the relatively ‘safe’ bounds of the historical re-enactment of everyday life in a field hospital where the fact of a rape, though horrific, is perhaps not in itself that surprising. What raises this scene above the level of documentary however is the way it’s shot. The viewer is shown Sakamoto lifting up successive layers of Nurse Nishi’s undergarments but at the point of penetration the camera cuts to an exterior shot of the ward through a window which is quickly closed by a vigilant onlooker. Visually, the incident is closed off from the viewer and what we are ‘left’ with is a brief muffled scream before the next scene, of Nishi informing the Head Nurse of the event, is upon us.

It would be easy to overlook the way this scene ends but it’s a signal for much of what’s to come. Not only does it reinforce the sense of claustrophobia within which the whole film operates – most of the ‘action’ happens inside in a closed-off world and when we are shown ‘outside’ it’s often shot from inside – but it’s also the first point in the film where we suspect we are not in a nuts-and-bolts war drama. The denial of audience involvement in the rape scene is also one of a number of moments where Masumura withholds what the viewer can and can’t see and these become more intense as the film proceeds.

As a result of his transgression, Sakamoto is redrafted to the front and Nishi herself soon moves closer to the frontline where she becomes assistant to the field hospital surgeon, Dr Okabe. Here we are shown the full-on consequences of battle as wave after wave of casualties enter the hospital and it’s for Okabe to decide their fate. More often than not he is required to amputate limbs because of a lack of suitable drugs. Early on Nishi is forced to hold down a patient whilst his leg is sawn off and from the way it is filmed there are clear parallels between this and the previous rape scene, the difference being we are allowed to watch this time. I find this problematic because although we are invited to view these scenes as versions of each other it’s difficult to see to what extent they are equivalent even given the power relations involved in both acts. Indeed this is the first in a number of incidents which expose the film’s conflicted sexual politics. The second of these isn’t far behind as a badly wounded Sakamoto is brought into the field hospital needing a blood transfusion. However transfusions can only be given to soldiers of superior rank and it is only through Nishi’s pleading with Dr Okabe on his behalf that he undergoes treatment. Do we applaud Nishi’s selfless act, that she is able to forgive her former aggressor? It’s a difficult question and one that we aren’t allowed to linger over as Sakamoto dies anyway having wasted precious blood.

One significant result of Nishi’s actions is that it attracts the attention of Dr Okabe who summons her to his quarters. Here he secretly admits that he no longer thinks of himself as a real surgeon but as a caricature turning all his patients into cripples. The conversation that follows is extraordinary for its combination of crudity and compassion. Okabe’s policy of mass amputation means he is effectively emasculating a generation of Japanese men yet Okabe is himself sexually non-functioning – the job has driven him to drink and morphine which has in turn rendered him impotent – and he implores Nishi to inject him so that he can sleep. There’s clearly a role reversal here. The hacker-off of limbs, the impotence machine, is feminized whilst Nishi assumes the role of male aggressor, syringe in hand (in a later scene this is made more explicit as Okabe makes her dress up in his uniform). Sexual analogy is played out very blatantly but the scene is filmed with a sustained lyrical tenderness that makes it also heart-warming (though this too is undercut by the gentle but austere soundtrack which sounds like some of the quieter of Bach’s organ pieces). It’s an altogether unsettling combination and it makes for at times uneasy viewing. This is reinforced when Okabe tells Nishi to undress because a man of his rank can’t get drunk in front of a nurse, yet ‘undressing’ in this context means leaving on her chemise. There’s a child-like theatre to the whole affair which is reinforced when Okabe asks Nishi to wait by his side until he falls asleep, which casts Nishi less as angel than as mother.

Nishi’s time with Okabe is cut short and she is forced to return to the former field hospital where she now treats Orihara, an armless amputee who is a living example of Okabe’s butchery. Stuck in the hospital he is not allowed home because he is visible evidence of the horrors of war, the admission of which would be detrimental to public morale. Because he has no arms he is also an embodiment of Okabe’s secret guilt. One night as Nishi washes him he implores her to masturbate him as his missing hands have left him sexually unfulfilled and he fears he will never see his wife again. The previous scene between Nishi and Okabe is ratcheted up a notch here – indeed one wonders whether it’s not again another ‘version’ of this scene – with Orihara’s pleading drawn out to the extent that it’s nearly unwatchable. As Nishi’s hands are about to disappear under the sheets the camera cuts to the one of Okabe’s implements rhythmically sawing through a patient’s leg back on the frontline. Again this is a rather crude reminder of the link between amputation and sexual deprivation and it is followed by Orihara’s request that he masturbate her with one of his feet which have become as sensitive as his hands once were.

It’s at this point I think we realise how far we are from a ‘straightforward’ war drama and this is confirmed when Nishi takes Orihara to a hotel for sex. The ensuing sequence is remarkable for the way in which Masumura photographs the bodies. As Nishi bathes Orihara in the starkly photographed hotel bathroom we are shown his stumps, his partial body, yet we are afforded only partial glimpses of Nishi’s own ‘whole’ naked torso as she pirouettes close to the camera. Later in bed they lie across each other, the amputee’s torso covering the parts of Nishi’s body that can’t be shown because of the laws governing what can and can’t be revealed on film in Japan. In another shot Nishi covers her own breasts and Masumura has her head completely out of the frame, effectively beheading her. It’s a magnificent and complex instance of internal and external cinematic permissions coming together.

There’s another telling moment in this scene. Orihara asks Nishi why she is doing all this for him and her reply, ‘for no reason’, is oddly emblematic of her character which is throughout much of the film, certainly up to this point, more of a non-character. Although I’ve said rather flippantly that she’s ‘no Florence Nightingale’ I also kept wondering to what extent Nishi is the ‘red angel’ of the title, a moniker that seems to paint her as a force of destruction. At times the film tries to make us believe this or more accurately it tries to make us believe that she believes this is what she is but it’s not that convincing. For instance she blames herself for the death of Sakamoto and then for Orihara’s suicide – he jumps from the roof of the hospital to his death after Nishi tells him coldly that their encounter is never to be repeated – but there’s a blankness to her ‘sadistic’ rejection of Orihara as well as her burgeoning sense that she is responsible for both deaths. Perhaps the ‘red angel’ label sticks to her despite herself and it’s a comment by Masumura on the hopelessness and emptiness of choice available to those caught up in war – whatever course of action she decides on will inevitably end in death – but the problem with this view is that it can lead to the removal of agency from the equation and thus to a laissez-faire politics which is as disastrous in wartime as it is in times of (so-called) peace.

We might read also Nishi’s blankness as passivity and consequently no more than Masumura’s registration of the constraints placed on women during the war and immediate post-war years. This would be to read Red Angel as a comment on the ‘caring’ role of women who are forced to service a male-dominated Japan but this would hardly be news even in 1966. And what the film doesn’t do either is present us with the emergence of the new woman. After Orihara’s suicide, Nishi is sent back to Okabe’s hospital and the film is structurally locked in a rigid pattern of exile and return which won’t allow for any development of character or otherwise. Witness the scenes between Nishi and Okabe – although occupying different rooms they’re all shot to look the same, enclosed and unchanging and when Nishi does eventually tell Okabe that she loves him – because he reminds her of her father – we’re locked into another set of controls with which we’ve become all too familiar, certainly in the West.

The film’s final section which sees Okabe called yet closer to the front – farther and farther from Japan as he says to Nishi – is no less easy to watch than the rest. Accompanied by a more-than-willing Nishi they are diverted to a beleaguered military outpost where cholera becomes rampant reducing it to a handful of men awaiting an imminent Chinese attack. Intercutting the urgent scenes of expectant soldiers outside, Nishi forces Okabe to give up his morphine habit by tying him down in his quarters and making him go through cold turkey before his manhood is restored and he can die a fully reconstructed male. There’s little sense that Nishi has gained much from this final encounter except to pry the words ‘I love you’ from Okabe after he has achieved his long-delayed orgasm.

If this sounds cynical there is another way of reading it – as a blindly romantic transcendental tryst whose participants must remain oblivious to imminent death – but I think Masumura himself undercuts such a reading by the way he ends the film. After the Chinese attack, Nishi is the only survivor and scouring the camp she discovers Okabe’s corpse, drawn samurai sword in hand. The temptation to see this as evidence of a newly-discovered capacity for heroism is undermined by the fact that his sword has been reduced to a mere stump not unlike the limbs of his unfortunate patients. It’s an unsettling end to a film that constantly denies resolution and I was left with the distinct impression that the landscapes, both interior and exterior, through which its characters move are as much indicators of psychological states as the backdrop for the playing out any kind of ‘story.’ This is unsurprising perhaps for a so-called ‘new-wave’ director and there’s clear evidence throughout Red Angel of sophistication in Masumura’s handling of the mechanics of film. I was still left wondering however, after the death of all three ‘lovers’, what Nishi was left with. As with many of Masumura’s counterparts in Europe the handling of sexual politics is fraught and difficult to ignore.

Jeff Hilson

Format: DVD

Release date: 22 May 2007

Distributor: Yume Pictures

Director: Yasuzo Masumura

Original title Môjuu

Cast Eiji Funakoshi, Mako Midori, Noriko Sengoku

Japan 1969

86 minutes

From the very first frame, Masumura’s Blind Beast is as visually arresting as it is morally dubious, and it doesn’t let up pursuing its own preposterous logic for a second from then on in. What more can you ask of a film? Whatever the narrative may seem to claim, it would be a gross injustice to suggest that Blind Beast has anything as coherent as a thesis. There are ideas at work, of course, but really, if you want to discipline them and make them reasonable you will have to poke your eyes out. Which is just as things should be.

Early one morning, artist’s model Aki is visiting a photographic exhibition featuring images of herself in various states of bondage, reminiscent of (though predating) the work of Nobuyoshi Araki. In the sterile, brightly-lit, empty gallery she comes upon a man on his knees, strangely embracing and scrupulously caressing the nude sculpture (also modeled by Aki) that forms the centre-piece of the exhibition. Within minutes, the same man has turned up at Aki’s apartment in the guise of a masseur, knocked her out with chloroform and, with the help of his grimly besotted mother, carted her off to a bleak and isolated warehouse. We know the warehouse is bleak and isolated because we do not see the way there, or any suggestion of surrounding space: it is always presented by the same twilit establishing shot in mottled greys, occasionally enlivened with flecks of snow. The whole film is, in many respects, remarkably minimal. There are only the three characters mentioned and not a single other breathing human figure. The action from now on is confined to the interior of the warehouse, made up of a spartan living space where Michio the blind sculptor and his mother live, eat, and share a bed. Through the double iron doors, however, lies the more ambiguous space where Aki is imprisoned.

Michio’s ‘studio’ is likewise minimal in its palette, but otherwise monstrous and excessive. Aki awakes to find herself surrounded by a cavernous darkness punctuated by off-white giant effigies of dismembered female body parts. As Michio explains his artistic mission and tries to persuade Aki to become his muse, the camera reveals what appear to be only small areas of a much vaster space; one that has no visible walls, is not unambiguously rectilinear, and is ultimately incomprehensible. At one point the camera makes a series of high speeding jolting pans to reveal one segment at a time, each devoted to a different body part. Each tableau is flat, but fish-eyed: logically, they ought to be walls, but they doní‚´t add up as walls. The only things holding all this together are two giant recumbent female torsos occupying the studio floor, one supine, one prone. It is around these, particularly the one on its back, that the action and sense of space increasingly revolves. The only touch of vivid colour is Akií‚´s green dress, but this quickly fades. Latterly, the scene is all chiaroscuro in close-up, small moments of light picked out in an enveloping, shapeless darkness. By now, Aki has lost her sight, presumably out of sympathy, and the presentation of blindness has shifted. Earlier Michio showed off his agility and awareness, nimbly chasing Aki round the studio in near-slapstick, now-you-see-them-now-you-don’t routines. By the end, they are both clambering tremulously like Beckett characters whose misfortune is to be condemned to inhabit a big papier-mí­Â¢ché lady; quivering, boggling, reaching with splayed fingers, stumbling.

The film, it seems, is trying to find a way to render non-visual intimacy in an inescapably visual medium. In this respect, it is almost as crazy as the blind beast himself. Why, laments Michio, should art be all about sight and touch? He will create a new genre of art devoted to touch, an art by and for the blind. Tragically for him, the genre in question has already been around for some centuries. What is more, there is nothing in it that positively excludes the sighted, and you are often not even allowed to touch it. It’s sculpture! But it seems almost cruel to point this out, and certainly Aki is too scared to mention it. The theme of blindness is nevertheless important to the film, and it places it oddly in relation to other famous cinematic obsessions with the female body. When cinema has taken a long hard look at itself, it has often concluded there may be something voyeuristic in its very nature. Most obviously, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) upset people because it had the camera perform the rape and violation which it usually only happens to witness. The spectacle of alluringly terrified women driven into darkened corners on its own would hardly raise an eyebrow. Blind Beast, on the other hand, claims not to be about voyeurism at all. Michio’s beef is that, as a blind man, he has been deprived of the only sort of contact that makes sense to him: why should he not be allowed to touch beautiful ladies just as we get to see them?

We, of course, do get to see a lot of Aki, and in a light that becomes more and more curious. After her initial and understandable attempts to escape, at one point aided by the incestuously jealous matron, Aki inevitably falls for her touchingly virginal captor. Her conversion is abrupt to say the least, and the descent into limb-chopping suicidal lunacy is vertiginous. If only they had heard King Missile’s ‘Gary and Melissa’, they would have seen there were many more erotic options open to them between massage and butchery. Even Nagisa Oshima’s famously adventurous couple in Ai no corrida (1976) make their perverse progress at an infinitely more sedate pace. The turning point is Michio’s mother’s death. After this the camera barely leaves the studio; once to focus on Mum’s putrid grave, and once to follow Michio in search of Akií‚´s ultimate sex-toys, a cleaver and mallet. As he returns, she assumes the position, the one, that is, that she took for Michio’s sculpture. And as the cleaver falls, it is the limbs of the sculpture we see fall with a clunk to the studio floor.

But it’s also the posture of the vast landscaped reclining Robert Crumb woman that was already the centrepiece of the studio when Aki first awoke there. For that matter, it bears more than a passing resemblance to the sculpture by a quite different artist round which the pair first met. The whole point of abducting Aki was to produce an unprecedented, genre-forging perfection in the art of touch. To this end, he spends quite a considerable time ascertaining the precise form and consistency of Akií‚´s breasts. He also artfully conceals them in the process. This coyness continues throughout the sex scenes, but interestingly enough is completely forgotten once torture is the order of the day. And what we see here is that Aki’s breasts bear absolutely no relation to those on the sculpture supposed to represent her. What the sculpture does have are the very same mountainous breasts as its artistic ancestors. These breasts, the vast hill-like ones, have a large part in the film. Intimacy gravitates towards their sheltering valley. On a more practical note, they are useful as hand-holds when scaling the heights of giant torsos. But most importantly, they are also a sort of leitmotiv of commodified femininity throughout. They owe their form not to the vagaries of individual artistic perception, but to an invariable, transcendent consumer demand. We are all, it seems, blind beasts, but that never stopped us looking.

Stephen Thomson

British director Nicolas Roeg was hardly unaccustomed to controversy. Throughout the 1970s, his work had regularly elicited vehement reactions. Roeg’s 1970 debut Performance (co-directed with Donald Cammell) was shelved by Warner Bros for two years while the suits worked out what to do with his psychosexual gangster meltdown. And then, three years later, Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland’s controversial humping in Don’t Look Now brought the censors out in hives. But even seasoned provocateur Roeg was shocked by the fallout to Bad Timing.

The film’s distributor, Rank, labelled it ‘a sick film made by sick people for sick people’ before begrudgingly releasing it in October 1980. It was a reckless damning. The truth is that Bad Timing, billed as ‘a terrifying love story’, is an uncomfortable experience filled with pain, obsession and bitterness. And, with its alienated characters, fractured timeframe and plenty of sex, quintessential Roeg cinema.

On paper, Bad Timing is a simple enough story set in cold-war Vienna. Alex Linden (Art Garfunkel) is a straight-laced university lecturer who embarks on a passionate affair with Milena Flaherty (Theresa Russell), a ravishing pleasure-seeking siren. Their relationship starts to implode when Alex is assigned by the US government to investigate Stefan Vognic (Denholm Elliott), Milena’s Czech husband. Inspector Netusil (Harvey Keitel) is called in to piece together the events that have led to Milena fighting for her life in hospital after a suicide attempt. Through Roeg’s radical editing style, their love story is diced up, turned in on itself and played out as a romance in reverse. Graphic shots of overdosed Milena in surgery are intercut with scenes from the couple’s shared history. The result is a rich and complex mosaic of experience, details and identity.

Fate is at the heart of all the director’s films. And none more so than with Bad Timing. There is a claustrophobic sense of inevitability to Alex and Milena’s relationship. On meeting him for the first time at a party, she even says: ‘If we’re going to meet, it might as well be now.’ The characters are on an unstoppable course, swerving towards emotional oblivion. In Don’t Look Now, the inescapable climax was John Baxter’s predestined date with violent destiny dressed in a red duffel coat; here, it is the absolute disintegration of a couple. The sensation is like a looped dream. The viewer can’t help but want to reorganise the edited scraps in a desperate bid to change the unavoidable outcome in some way.

Another reoccurring theme is that of chaos versus order. In Performance, straight-laced hood Chas (James Fox) comes undone in the disordered world of drug-addled Turner (Mick Jagger). For all his hip talk and professor swagger, Bad Timing‘s Alex is similarly pedestrian. He is unable to control the elemental force that is Milena and seems out of his depth in her wayward lifestyle. It is a doomed partnership: he wants to marry and own her; she wants to enjoy the moment. Alex lectures on voyeurism to his students: ‘We are constantly in isolation, watching, spying on everyone and everything around us… I prefer to label myself an observer.’ At times, he is nothing but a jealous boy, peeping on Milena; Roeg playfully pokes at this when Alex, sat in the back of a truck in Morocco, struggles to peer through the dusty window at Milena sat up front with two lecherous men.

The Vienna setting of Bad Timing is crucial. Alex and Milena are both US citizens in a foreign land. They don’t belong there. All Roeg’s characters are visitors to another land: whether the Baxters in Venice in Don’t Look Now; Walkabout‘s English children in the Australian outback; Eastender Chas in Turner’s Notting Hill drug den in Performance; and, most literally, David Bowie as a marooned extraterrestrial in The Man Who Fell To Earth. They are all separated from their natural environment, trying to find a way home.

The tragic reality of Alex and Milena’s affair is beautifully hinted at in the opening scene. As Tom Waits sings ‘An Invitation to the Blues’ (‘She’s a moving violation from her conk down to her toes…’) on the soundtrack, Milena stands in a gallery, studying Klimt’s painting, The Kiss. At first, the artwork appears to be a study of an amorous clinch. But closer inspection reveals a chilling undercurrent: the man in the painting is passionately kissing the woman but his lover’s cheek is slightly turned, a disengaged gaze in her eyes. Klimt captures this fleeting moment forever. And in that suspended beat, the couple have never been further apart.

Like Klimt, Roeg is fascinated by these momentary incidentals. In his films, the edge of the frame, the split second is where the truth is hidden, or briefly held. This can be nothing more than a humorous aside: as in the scene where Alex meets with a tea-drinking diplomat to discuss the legalities of divorce in a foreign land. Roeg’s camera glimpses a bowl of heart-shaped sugar cubes: a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cry for sweet love perhaps. But Roeg also uses these flashes for unsettling purposes. And he does so with devastating effect early on in Bad Timing.

Alex is stood talking to a nurse in the hospital corridor, while a team of surgeons try to revive Milena. Netusil is led by the night duty officer past Alex. The two characters have not yet been introduced: they are strangers. Alex briefly looks up at Netusil and in that fraction, Netusil winks directly at him. It is nothing but, at the same time, everything. A link is made between the two: they are now somehow complicit in the events about to unfold. It is random, dazzling and confrontational. Just like the film.

Ben Cobb