MIFFburger #7: For Love's Sake

愛と誠 Takashi Miike, 2012

For Love’s Sake was the third and final Takashi Miike film that made the cut for MIFF 2012, and I can say that it was definitely the most outrageous. Something interesting about all three of his films selected for the festival this year is that they are all adaptations in some way. Ace Attorney was a video game adaptation, Hara Kiri was a remake, and For Love’s Sake is adapted from the 1970s manga series by Ikki Kajiwara, which has already seen a number of live action adaptations. Neither the manga nor the films have been released in the west, and had Miike not been attached to this most recent adaptation, I dare say we never would have seen this one either. And so, I went into this film not knowing anything other than what the program synopsis said, which was basically along the lines of violent, melodramatic musical. Sounds like fun to me.

Makoto (Satoshi Tsumabuki) is a delinquent youth, a lone wolf constantly getting into rumbles with street gangs for no apparent reason, until a young girl named Ai (Emi Takei) takes it upon herself to reform him, also for no apparent reason (except maybe a crush). They are two kids from opposite sides of the tracks; a street kid and a private school bourgeois, and so begins their bizarre, song, dance and violence filled relationship.

This is not your conventional musical. The closest cinematic point of reference would probably be Bollywood, but even then, the musical side is much more developed and integral to the genre. The songs in For Love's Sake are employed mainly for providing theme songs for individual characters, and pretty much everyone does receive one, with the songs also functioning as welcome breaks from the film’s almost constant barrage of violence. More often than not however, the musical numbers in Love’s Sake feel a bit tacked on. Their contrived and self aware style is used mostly (and effectively) for laughs, rather than character/story development, and any chances for extravagant West Side Story style gang confrontation set pieces aren’t seized, with dance numbers consisting mostly of mostly awkward and stilted choreography. Even though we are a long way from Broadway, Miike does seem to have his own style of command over the musical genre. He leaves gaps between songs just long enough for you to forget that you’re watching a musical and then drops one on your head, and also pokes fun at musical conventions by altering the surroundings of the singing characters to destroy their presumed utopian musical environment when they, and we, are least expecting it.

Just like in Ace Attorney, Miike has done a great job of transposing cartoon characters into a live action world. The characters in For Love’s Sake are delightfully one dimensional, consumed by their individual goals and bizarre hang ups that Miike never feels obligated to explain. Characters flip out, change their ways, lose hope and start fights all at the drop of an emotional hat, again taking the musical from its origins into twisted new locations. The story is set in the 70s, but I do wish a bit more was done with the costumes (granted, most of them are school uniforms) and I still think that the colour correction, giving everything slightly a more golden look is a bit of a cheat’s way out. But the sets are unbelievable, particularly the Hanazono Trade School, a post apocalyptic wasteland overrun by gangs that looks like something out of Akira. The film’s focus on youth gangs is also very 70s. The inclusion of girl gangs and female bosses is a staple of Japanese cinema, particularly the Sukeban and Terrifying Girls High School series of exploitation films of the 70s. Outrageous antics and violence are the order of the day, with a wide range of funny gang members, each with their own gimmick or trademark, yet all who have no qualms with beating the absolute shit out of anyone, or even each other.

The film’s excessive violence is completely cartoonish in nature. Makoto takes a beating no man could withstand, yet the film makes it clear that we are in a cartoon world, removing the violence of any real consequence or weight, enabling it to work on a purely comedic and un-PC level. There’s nothing quite as refreshing as a film with a bit of girl bashing is there? 70s exploitation fun (acid face burning, girls bound and hung from the ceiling) is referenced, but never fully delivered, and the fight scenes really do get a bit boring, as does the meandering of the largely directionless characters, who are of course reunited at the end in classical musical denouement. The film is a wild pastiche of genres and conventions, and while it may not be wholly satisfying, Miike has definitely created a new and interesting postmodern riff on the classic musical.

The best thing is that, like so much of Miike’s work, the film doesn’t take itself too seriously. The characters are silly, the story is silly and the songs are silly. In fact, there may be too much silliness for the average viewer. But this movie is still good (silly) fun.

Silly.