Hazard

Reviewer: Jeremy Hatch
Rating (out of 5): ****

Japanese director and avant-garde poet Sion Sono has a reputation for making controversial and provocative films with a goofy touch (for example, one of his less well-received films is a horror flick about cursed hair extensions). Hazard is the first film of his that I've seen, and I found it playfully transgressive and hilarious, entertaining all the way through, if also a little too long.

The storyline is equal parts gritty coming-of-age story, noirish crime spree, absurdist theater, buddy film, and meditation on being a young male in the naked (New York) city; it features a lot of armed robbery, gunfights, rhapsodic talk, pointless killing, a bad cop who gets axed (literally), a shootout in a Chinatown mafia den, and many, many gallons of speed-laced ice cream. However, it's safe for those with weak stomachs: although the packaging plays the film up as a Tarantino-style splatterfest, the bloodshed here is mostly notional, in classic low-budget style. When the blanks go off, the 'victims' double over and fall out of the shot, and that's the last we see of them.

The first scene sets the tone for the rest: three young guys are bullshitting as they walk down a city street. A child's voice narrates: "Harlem, 1991. Some Japanese after the economic bubble burst." The guy in the middle, Lee (Jai West) is running through a manic Japanese-English spiel directed at the guy on one side, Shin (Joe Odagiri) about the guy on the other, Takeda (Motoko Fukami).

They pause and go into a liquor store. Lee and Takeda whip out ridiculously huge firearms and Lee shouts for everybody to put their hands up. "Shin! Say your line!"

Shin flips nervously through his notebook and says his line: "Can I have it please?" In Japanese.

"Not in Japanese, you idiot!"

Shin searches again, and hesitantly shouts, "Can I have it please?"

"What the fuck is 'it'?"

"Can I have money please?"

Lee whoops: "That's more like it!" and goes on to collect wallets from everybody in the store.

It's this kind of absurdist humor -- the spectacle of a Japanese tourist learning to hold up liquor stores -- that dominates the film, and yet it also has a way of unexpectedly turning serious and lyrical, as in one long sequence involving a recitation of Walt Whitman.

Shin, we soon learn, was a college student back in Tokyo, desperately bored by the safe life there and his fatuous, unattractive girlfriend. In a guidebook he reads that New York City is the most dangerous place on earth, so that's where he decides to go. Of course, he's mugged upon arrival, and when he goes into a convenience store to steal a danish out of hunger, his petty theft is noticed by Lee and Takeda, who then proceed to hold the place up for the danish, and then take Shin in to live and learn with them.

Jai West as Lee gives the most spectacular performance throughout all their exploits --which includes a long, hilarious sequence with the three driving a Kool Man truck and selling the aforementioned "special" ice cream to hopeless addicts, before getting high on the ice cream themselves, picking up some girls, and making out on a couch with them atop a garbage pile. Always manically riffing like a latter-day Neal Cassady, West clearly regards crime, especially armed robbery, as a kind of edgy performance art. The more theatrical and over-the-top it gets, the better it is.

While West constantly upstages the rest of the cast with these antics, the strongest performance is Joe Odagiri's as Shin. It's interesting that a movie consisting mostly of absurdist theatrics is ultimately so moving; but essentially, the film describes the transformation of an idealistic naif into a hollowed-out nihilist, and Odagiri portrays this transformation with such skill that it makes Hazard memorable.

Posted by cphillips at September 3, 2009 11:35 AM