A French filmmaker, Jean-Pierre Limosin, has made a documentary about the world of the yakuza, Japanese gangsters.
At least, I think it’s a documentary. At times it seems “Young Yakuza” must have been staged and acted, given Limosin’s degree of access to this shadow world.
On the other hand, if it is scripted, it must be an experimental movie. “Young Yakuza” doesn’t have a great deal of drama, and two-thirds of the way through it loses its protagonist.
He is a pimply-faced, 20-year-old slacker named Naoki. His mother has agreed to an apprenticeship with the local yakuza boss, perhaps because Naoki seems unmotivated to do anything else.
He takes an entry-level position with the Kumagai clan, which means serving the tea and cleaning up the kitchen. Still, the rules apply: He must maintain silence about his life in the clan, he must show absolute deference to the boss, and he must get a haircut.
The real source of fascination in all this is the boss, Mr. Kumagai. Still a fairly youngish man, he comes across as a model of fairness and wisdom; if something goes wrong, he doesn’t explode, he calmly wonders what he might have done to prevent the situation from happening.
You’d like to have him as your boss, in fact. Well, except that he’s a gangster.
We don’t see the dirtier business of the Kumagai clan because Limosin had made an agreement to show only the everyday habits of the men, not their criminal activities. This gives the movie a weird disconnect: We might be watching a documentary about a school for good manners.
Mr. Kumagai is so much more charismatic than young Naoki that we almost don’t miss it when Naoki goes missing partway through the movie. This must have instilled panic in the filmmaker, or maybe he saw it as a way to break out of the conventional documentary mold.
I wish “Young Yakuza” were as consistently interesting as it sounds, but it’s a rather slow go. The fact that a movie about professional criminals could be dull is certainly an irony — and maybe the irony is the point?
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