Takashi Miike’s movies care little about rules, boundaries and restraint. No matter their genre of choice (and he loves them all), they’re uninhibited orgies of cinematic pleasures, and that’s again true of the prolific 59-year-old Japanese master’s latest, First Love. Even if you’ve seen a million gangster sagas, you’ve never experienced one quite like this.
Having now exceeded, as a director, the 100-movie mark (a feat accomplished with 2017’s awesome samurai bloodbath Blade of the Immortal), Miike returns to Yakuza business with First Love (in theaters Sept. 27), whose relatively patient and meticulous introductory passages are mere set-up for the ensuing raft of head-spinning punchlines. Initially, those blows are quite literal, doled out by Leo (Masataka Kubota), a young Tokyo pugilist whose demeanor is placid whether he’s training by himself (his earphones his only companion), sparring with a partner, or throwing jabs and hooks in the ring opposite opponents. Leo is even undemonstrative in victory, such that his trainer chastises him for his sullen reserve, suggesting he let out a triumphant yell upon winning a bout.
Overt displays of emotion, though, aren’t really Leo’s thing, no matter the circumstances—including after he mysteriously falls down during a fight and subsequently receives news that he has a fatal brain tumor. With no family to speak of (his parents abandoned him on a doorstep as an infant), Leo wanders the city at night, content to spend his final days alone. Yet fate—or Miike, if you like—has other plans for him. Following an impromptu visit to a fortune teller who opines that Leo is destined for a long life and should thus learn to fight not for himself but for others, he gets the chance to do just that when a young woman named Monica (Sakurako Konishi) bumps into him while fleeing an older man and screaming for help. His protective instincts kicking in, Leo knocks the pursuing fellow out, thus instigating a relationship with the harried beauty.
Lest that make it sound like First Love is a straightforward affair, this encounter occurs only once we’ve already been introduced to Monica, whose father has sold her into prostitution-slavery to the Yakuza in order to pay off his debts. Monica is a junkie, using drugs to stifle her recurring visions of a young boy from her past, and her father draped in a sheet like a specter. It’s this ghost that Monica is running away from when she collides with Leo. The man chasing her is her date, police officer Otomo (Nao Omori), who’s teamed up with a scheming mid-level Yakuza henchman named Kase (Shôta Sometani) to steal and sell his crew’s drugs, and to then pin the heist on Monica and a rival Chinese gang run by one-armed bigwig Wang (Cheng-Kuo Yen), who wants revenge against Kase’s boss Gondo (Seiyô Uchino) for severing his appendage during a prior skirmish.
Got that? First Love slowly accelerates as these pieces move into place, along the way introducing a raft of other characters—on both sides of the brewing Japanese-Chinese turf war—destined to play a part in the ensuing mayhem. Most crucial of all, at least initially, is Julie (Becky Rabone), whose boyfriend (Monica’s pimp) is in possession of the drugs Kase and Otomo covet. Once things go south, Julie embarks on her own vengeful rampage—or, at least, she does so following her escape from an apartment set on fire by Kase, who before booby-trapping it to explode discovers that Julie has a roommate—her grandmother!—and promptly cold-cocks her in the face.
Brash, arrogant and nonchalant about the horrors he’s perpetrating, Kase is a routine scene-stealer, and his exaggerated reactions to extreme situations—including being shot in the gut and then having Monica sniff meth off his crotch—occasionally recall those of Stranger Things’ Joe Keery. Not that he’s the only one responsible for First Love’s wacky energy. A sequence in which Monica tries to use music to distract herself from the appearance of her father’s spirit while on a subway train, only to cause the tighty-whities-wearing ghost to start awkwardly boogying before her eyes in the well-populated car, is as absurdly surreal as they come. And as is his penchant, Miike generates droll humor from splattery showdowns involving a slew of interrelated characters, many of whom, it must be said, have the unfortunate habit of losing their heads under pressure.
Beneath First Love’s over-the-top surface lurk messages about the preciousness of time, the strength that comes from selflessness, and the importance of setting the past aside in order to focus on the future. Those notions, however, are often deliberately hard to spy amidst the gonzo carnage orchestrated by the director. Working from a playful Masa Nakamura script that hopelessly entangles its myriad players—in large part over the course of one long, eventful, decapitation-heavy night—Miike eventually hits a breakneck stride that’s exhilarating. His various points of focus crisscross and converge crazily, until it becomes clear that only a considerable amount of bloodletting (and, maybe, some out-of-left-field animé) will rectify this knotty situation.
First Love eventually delivers on its pulpy promises, but what’s so entertaining about the film is that its gratuitousness is played as a self-conscious joke. Miike recognizes that everyone involved in this tall tale of murder, misery and romance—from doomed boxer Leo and traumatized damsel in distress Monica, to cocksure Kase and corrupt Otomo—is a transparent riff on a cinematic archetype. Rather than trying to imbue them with unique depth, he opts instead to spin them around in circles until they don’t know which way they’re headed and we’re delightfully dizzy from the sheer bravado of the filmmaking on display.
In other words, it’s a delirious showcase for its creator’s razzle-dazzle formal skills, with Miike cleverly juggling all manner of plot strands, interpersonal relationships, emotional crises, and wild tonal shifts. The director may not have much more on his mind than showing off on familiar turf, but that doesn’t alter the fact that his scintillating stewardship makes First Love a vibrant, adrenalized new addition to his ever-burgeoning oeuvre.
