The events in the film are all set
in motion when two men, one seemingly good and the other apparently evil, hit a
man while driving one night. Shiro is a theology student who also happens to be
romantically involved with his professor’s daughter. It is a perfect situation
that is destroyed, as everything is, by the one accident of killing a man in a
hit and run. The evil man convinces Shiro that he is partly responsible for
deciding to take the road that the drunk man was stumbling down. When it turns
out that the drunk man they killed is a yakuza whose mother saw the car, Shiro
and Tamura find themselves in trouble. Shiro is punished the most because he is
forced to watch the people he cares about die until he finds his way to hell.
We follow the two men on their journey to hell, at which point the style of the
film is in complete control and narrative structure is fiendishly confused.
Shiro is allowed to ask forgiveness
with many that he meets in the afterlife, possibly giving him some final redemption,
but it is important to remember that the literal translation of the title is
“hell”, and that seems to be the exact journey that the film tries to take the
audience on. There is no relief in which Shiro has a chance to recover ground.
It is a fast and steady decline from the moment that he makes the one mistake.
As he makes the journey we are brought through the different stages of hell,
allowed to experience them through the strange style which director Nobuo
Nakagawa commits to through the entire film. There is a lot of fire, screaming
and weird men with their faces painted, but as the film continues the violence
becomes more and more shocking.
The visions of hell are solid and
are definitely the strongest thing about Jigoku, which is apparent when the
images are shown in much more emphasis than the plot in the second half of the
film. The first half does a good job at setting up the random manner in which
the story will be told, but it also does very little to prepare the audience
for the horrors which follow.
The DVD of this film from 1960
brings a great transfer which is newly restored and high definition digital.
There are a number of other perks, but the best in the bunch is definitely
Building the Inferno, a new documentary which focuses on Nakagawa during the
making of the film. The documentary also features interviews with actor Yoichi
Numata, screenwriter Ichiro Miyagawa and many other collaborators. There is
also a theatrical trailer, galleries of poster art, and an insert essay by
Asian-cinema critic Chuck Stephens.
No comments:
Post a Comment