Synopsis: Rikio Ishikawa (Tetsuya Watari) makes himself a notorious outcast in the post WW2 turf wars on the streets of Japan. He picks brutal fights with rival Chinese and Korean gangs, refuses to follow orders from his own leaders and is eventually given ten years' suspension from gang activity. Helped by sympathetic friends, he tries to rejoin but betrays every code in the yakuza book by striking one superior and killing another. With his long time, long-suffering girlfriend, Rikio eventually becomes a drug addict.
In the 70s explosion of increasingly violent and nihilistic yakuza films, Fukasaku's Graveyard of Honor searches for originality with its 'true biography' account of Rikio, a violent sociopath who cannot let a day pass without committing some outrage or another. That's all we ever really learn about him, despite flashbacks to not-particularly illuminating childhood traumas. Even though an objective narrator peppers the story with regular updates on Rikio's criminal progress, the thug never becomes an interesting character.
Rikio is incapable of forming normal human contacts, although he allies for a number of years with a fellow drug addict, and abuses a common-law female companion for what seems decades. In true yakuza "meeting cute" fashion, she hides a gun for Rikio and is then cruelly raped for her trouble. In yakuza films women always seem to be drawn to the men who rape them, so this innocent starts a life of humiliation and drugs that the film treats as a positive relationship. The title refers to the aged and dying Rikio's act of giving her an honorable burial, which seems pointless after what has gone before.
There's nothing wrong with picking a radical filming style, but Kinji Fukasaku frequently opts for visuals that express little beyond cinematic chaos. Early fight scenes crowd dozens of people before a jerking, blurring camera and the action is such a mess that we can't tell for a moment what is going on. Another scene has two people carrying on a conversation in the midst of a drunken orgy, shot with a long lens as loud revelers stumble and grapple all around them. There are plenty of scenes shot in a more normal fashion, but Fukasaku's erratic style is highly suspicious - it seems a way of getting a 'scene' in the can with the least effort possible.
There's plenty of violence, drug use, casual nudity and blood that looks like fire engine red paint, all shot in a disjointed fashion. The erratic technique substitutes pace for characterization, precluding our emotional involvement. Graveyard of Honor barely tells its story and is for yakuza fans entertained by the abstract, ragged edge of the genre.
Home Vision Entertainment's DVD of Graveyard of Honor can boast a stunning enhanced transfer of a movie that scrupulously hides any notion of design or preplanning. The blaring soundtrack is also clearly reproduced. The disc docus A Portrait of Rage and On the Set with Fukasaku laud the long career of the maker of Battle Royale and Battles without Honor and Humanity (soon to come to DVD) without really expressing why the director is so highly regarded. Liner notes by Tom Mes place Graveyard of Honor within the evolution of the yakuza genre.
There are trailers for this feature and several other Fukasaku crime films. For more information about Graveyard of Honor, visit Home Vision Entertainment. To order Graveyard of Honor, go to TCM Shopping.
by Glenn Erickson
