CAPONE CRIES A LOT

In this underseen late-career masterwork from Seijun Suzuki (BRANDED TO KILL, TOKYO DRIFTER), Kaiemon, a naniwa-bushi performer, travels to Prohibition-era San Francisco in search of prosperity. Convinced that Al Capone is President of the United States and that he may impress him with his old-fashioned singing, he instead falls in with unsavory Japanese hoteliers, Chinese moneylenders and bootleggin’ Italian-American mafiosos.

As surrealistic and elliptical as ever, Suzuki packages his career-long obsessions and slingshots them back towards the USA in a parodic carnival pondering on the intersection between American and Japanese iconography and imperialism. Shot in Japan at an abandoned amusement park, Suzuki’s collage-like transplantation of American culture is at once uncomfortable (racist minstrel bands in blackface, the Ku Klux Klan and anti-Japanese sentiment coexist) and reverential (folding jazz, blues, traditional Japanese arts and slapstick into one aesthetic continuum), reflecting Suzuki’s understanding of US politics and bringing his “borderless” aesthetic project full circle.