Japanese director Seijun Suzuki is best known to Western audiences for a pair of brilliant B-movie thrillers which he made for the Nikkatsu corporation back in the 1960s.

 

Tokyo Drifter and Branded to Kill were racy, psychedelic, pop-art inflected oddities, which have since been acknowledged as influences by everyone from Hong Kong's John Woo and South Korea's Park Chan-wook to the United State's Jim Jarmusch and (inevitably) Quentin Tarantino.

 

Yet Nikkatsu, for whom art was very much a by-product of exploitation, found the director's approach altogether too experimental.

 

"They told me my films didn't make money and they didn't make sense," said Suzuki, who had been churning out an average of four features a year for Nikkatsu. "So they fired me."

 

Today, the octogenarian Suzuki is considered a cult director, thanks largely to the growing appeal of those notorious Nikkatsu releases. In 2001, he revisited the territory of Branded to Kill with the altogether more uncertain Pistol Opera. Now, with the 2005 Cannes Festival selection, Princess Raccoon, Suzuki is back on idiosyncratic form, delivering an energetic, inventive and ever-so-slightly insane mishmash of music, magic and madness.

 

 

"Man cannot fall in love with a raccoon," we are told at the outset. "Or vice versa. It is ridiculous and impossible. But since this is the 13th night, let me set a love trap, for a fruitless love affair."

 

The ensuing fable concerns the banishment of handsome young prince, Amechiyo (Joe Odagiri ), by his vain father, Azuchi Momoyama (Mikijiro Hira ), who has been told by a sorceress that his son's beauty will soon eclipse his own.

 

Dispatched to the Sacred Mountain from which "nobody can come out with his breath" (as Azuchi's wife has already discovered), Amechiyo meets and falls for the beautiful Princess Tanuki (Zhang Ziyi), a raccoon spirit who takes him back to her mysterious palace.

 

Singing, dancing, gaiety and weirdness ensue. Perhaps love can blossom between man and raccoon after all.

 

Paying homage to the Japanese "Tanukigoten" musicals of the 1940s and 1950s while merrily plundering the campest elements of Western rock, Eastern rap and Busby Berkeley choreography, Suzuki throws cultural caution to the wind.

 

One minute, the performers are grunting and gesticulating in the masked and face-painted traditions of noh and kabuki; the next, they are dancing to hot Latino beats, stamping their feet, waving their butts and swooning in the kind of camera-swirl embraces beloved of Baz Luhrmann.

 

Imagine a Japanese opera troupe having a night off at a neon-lit karaoke club where the drinks are spiked with mescaline and you'll have some idea of the sublime strangeness of it all.

 

The staging is self-consciously theatrical, with sets and spotlights emphasizing the atmosphere of artifice and cheesy computer superimposition providing the rough-and-ready magic.

 

The whole thing has the sham-bolic air of a boisterous pantomime, right down to the shuddering camera tracks, which accompany the all-hands-on-deck dance routines.

 

At the middle of all this delightful invention is Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi, currently the East's hottest screen export thanks to starring roles in Zhang Yimou's martial arts romance House of Flying Daggers and Rob Marshall's Memoirs of a Geisha. There's something naughtily subversive about her role here, in which she sings and speaks a peculiar blend of native Mandarin and phonetic Japanese.

 

Filmed before Memoirs of a Geisha, but clearly benefiting from the high profile which that film gave its star, Princess Raccoon showcases another side of Zhang's adaptive talents.

 

The audience sees her sweet smile, flashing eyes and extravagant wigs perfectly complementing the kitsch tone of the scenery. The camera loves her, but her response to its adoration is admirably arch, bordering upon satirical.

 

What's most extraordinary, however, is the manic level of energy that Suzuki sustains throughout this wild romp. Whether orchestrating the hoofed-up musical numbers or executing surreal battle scenes with a tendril-spouting sorceress (a scene-stealing Saori Yuki ) the director turns every set piece up to 11.

 

It's clear that Suzuki is having a ball, but given that he is 83, one can only marvel at his ability to rally the troops in such a frenzied, frenetic endeavor. Watching Princess Raccoon, with its anarchic explosions of color, can be exhausting enough; what can it have been like to make it?

 

Western audiences may be aware that great swaths of Japanese cultural references are simply washing over them, but the cultural hybrid is so wide ranging that no one could feel utterly excluded from the film's peculiar spell. On this evidence, Suzuki is in danger of becoming an in-demand (if still unruly) filmmaker all over again.

 

(China Daily July 7, 2006)