CHOOSE TO LOSE: The motley crew of Katsuhito Ishii’s SMUGGLER
Kier-La Janisse

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“Smuggler pays knowing tribute to such gritty noir classics as “They Drive by Night” (1940) and “The Wages of Fear” (1953), whose trucker heroes were desperate men on the road to hell or, just maybe, salvation. This movie’s breakneck pace, pounding rhythm and simple, one-thing-after-another structure are more Ramones than Raoul Walsh, however.” – Mark Schilling, Japan Times

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Smuggler: Manga and Film

Following on the spiky coolness of Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl, the fanciful A Taste of Tea and the short-attention-span barrage of hysterical non-sequiturs that made up Funky Forest: The First Contact, writer/director Katsuhito Ishii (who also worked on the animated  segments of Tarantino’s Kill Bill during the same time he was making A Taste of Tea) returns to the Fantasia screen with Smuggler, a kinetic tonal mashup (and a smash at TIFF, Fantastic Fest, Sitges and order viagra no prescription more) about a failed actor whose crippling debts lead him inadvertently to a life of crime. Based on the manga Sumagurâ by Shohei Manabe, Satoshi Tsumabuki  (also seen in this year’s opening film For Love’s Sake) stars as Kinuta, a passive gambler who gets forced into a job as an underground “smuggler”: one third of a motley team who transport gangland murder victims, no questions asked. But as a mob war heats up in the wake of a blood-spattered hit on a http://www.fingermedia.tw/?p=1322787 major crime family kingpin, the team starts taking jobs on both sides of the cleanup crew, which causes them to be privy to perhaps too much information to be good for their life expectancies.

The hit in question was carried out by hired Chinese executioners Vertebrae and Viscera (named Spine and Guts in some versions of the film), but it is the seemingly invincible, insect-like assassin Vertebrae played by Ando Masanobu (also seen in this year’s Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale), clearly riffing on both Shingo Tsurumi in Ishii’s Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl, and Asano Tadanobu’s Ichi the Killer incarnation (the chameleon-like Tadanobu is also a regular of Ishii’s films, although he does not appear here) who is tormented by questions about the meaning of life and death. The assassin wonders at the machinations of his life-path and emerges as a surprisingly sympathetic character. He will find himself head-to-head with Joe, the dour-faced leader of the smugglers, who has his own questions – albeit ones he’s been avoiding.

Smugger: Manga and Film

When Joe’s gang are charged with transporting the manacled hitman to his victims’ mob family, headed up by the sadistic, histrionic, bushy-eyebrowed Jijii (Ishii regular Tatsuya Gashuin), the young widow of the dead  gangster insists on accompanying them in the truck, much to the Joe’s chagrin. And while the film is full of impressive fight scenes and violence, it’s in these moments, with the gangster’s stone-faced wife as an illuminating foil to the smugglers’ overall lack of ambition, that the heart of the film really comes to life. While initially Kinuta is set up as the hapless secure places to buy levitra in canada visa loser sucked into an illegal scheme, all three of the smugglers are losers, challenged in their complacency and ineptitude by the widow who shirks pleasantries in favour of being brutally frank.

Joe teases Kinuta for failing in his acting career and calls him a slacker, but it’s clear he also secretly chastises himself for not attempting some measure of success. But our guess is that he’s been travelling in the same pattern for some time; keeping his head down, getting the job done. His rationale is the question of which position is really the position of ‘privilege’ – to struggle to constantly prove oneself to people who think of you as expendable, or to remove oneself from the game entirely and settle at the bottom? When you choose to lose, you almost kind of win. At least that’s been Joe’s philosophy up til now.

However, these are preoccupations that can’t be dwelt upon too long considering the film’s more tactile MO of operatic death dances , alternately accelerating/slo-mo fight choreography , bromance, identity-swapping, diaper-fetishes, unrelenting torture, and of course the kind of wacky, dynamic humour that ran rampant in Funky Forest. But it’s exactly this blend of anarchic action and philosophical musing that makes the film such an important contribution to Ishii’s growing canon.

“I shouldn’t have dreamed, I shouldn’t have wanted, I shouldn’t have longed…for…anything…” Kinuta cheap pharmacy viagra whimpers in a moment of self-doubt. One of the taglines of the film is “Carry your own Future” , and while this could be interpreted as hopeful message about self-determination, in the context of this film it’s more implicit that the future in question is a cadaverous one  – it’s just a matter of when and how.

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SMUGGLER screens on July 23 at 7:25pm in the Hall Theatre and again on July 25 at 1:00pm in the Salle JA DeSeve. More information including images and trailer links on the film description page HERE.

About the author:

Kier-La Janisse

Kier-La Janisse is a film writer, publisher, producer, acquisitions executive for Severin Films and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. She is the author of Cockfight: A Fable of Failure (2024), House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012/2022) and A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (2007) and has been an editor on numerous books including Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (2021) and Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015). She wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021), and produced the acclaimed blu-ray box sets All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror (2021) and The Sensual World of Black Emanuelle (2023).