The film is set in Japan in the early 1930s, a crucial period for modern Japanese history in which the kind of militaristic imperialism that would lead the country to side with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy in World War II was solidifying in the national mindset. In a sense, then, Kiroku functions as a metonym for Japan as a whole: an imaginative, eager, ambitious young man who finds himself on the road to fascism. Kiroku is in love with Michiko (Junko Asano), his landlord’s sweet-faced, piano-playing daughter, and the tug-of-war within him is accentuated by her constantly trying to find positive avenues for his energy. But, in the end, playing piano doesn’t hold a candle to bar brawls and street fights.

Fighting Elegy traces Kiroku’s steady descent into a world of violence, one that eventually gets him kicked out of his high school and banished to a rural area where he falls in with militaristic gangs that feed on a steady diet of aggression. At this point, the notion of sexuality is completely sublimated to violence, as his fellow gang members insist that chasing girls is for “sissies”; it’s a waste of precious energy that could be better spent fighting. This eventually leads to Kiroku’s becoming involved with radical right-wing ideologue Kita Ikki, a real-life historical figure who wrote fascist tracts and organized a military coup d’etat that resulted in the assassination of numerous Japanese leaders on February 26, 1936.

Of course, because the film was directed by Seijun Suzuki, the heady subject matter is approached with a sometimes broadly comic sensibility that adds discord to the historical weightiness. Suzuki’s theme is the absurdity of violence, which is central to his most well-known films (1963’s Youth of the Beast, 1967’s Branded to Kill, 2001’s Pistol Opera). The violence of the fight scenes in Fighting Elegy, which is expertly choreographed and filmed, is often tempered by the inclusion of cartoonish sound effects. The gang brawls are designed to look like wars, and their ridiculousness is underscored in one scene where a massive throw-down is interrupted by Kiroku’s father pretending to be a police officer. Suzuki also revels in the absurd myopia of the adolescent libido (embarrassing unexpected erections and all), showing the world through Kiroku’s overheated eyes (although he, like all the other adolescents in the film, is played by an actor who is clearly a decade or more too old for the part).

However, Fighting Elegy is not a typical Suzuki film, in that it is not a deconstructed genre piece inflated with hot stylized air and a wicked sense of perversion. Shot in austere black and white (primarily due to the limited budget), Fighting Elegy is one of Suzuki’s most restrained films, particularly considering the fact that it was released in 1966, a year before he was fired from the Nikkatsu studio for his increasingly outrageous films.

He does employ some of his signature tricks, including strange camera angles, associational editing, and a few visual flourishes like mobile split screens. There are also moments of almost rapturous beauty, particularly some of the final shots in which snow blankets the narrative. But, overall it is an atypically restrained work from Suzuki, who clearly had strong feelings about the film’s theme and its reflection of the missteps his country had taken 30 years earlier, the scars of which were still raw.

Copyright ©2005 James Kendrick

All images copyright © The Criterion Collection