Fancy Pants Exploitation: Gate of Flesh
Just because it’s ambitious, well-shot and sometimes in a weird language doesn’t mean it isn’t exploitation!
Nikutai no mon (Gate of Flesh)
(1964)
Synopsis
A young woman named Maya finds herself homeless, starving and alone on the streets of Tokyo after her beloved brother fails to return from Borneo during WWII. She is taken in by a group of street-tough prostitutes and adapts quickly to their profession. The group has two very important rules—protect their territory and never ever have sex with any man for free. They prove how seriously they take these commandments when one of them breaks the later rule and has her hair cut off and is left naked and tied up for everyone to see on a row boat in the harbour.
Angered by their fate, the women share a nihilistic view of life—save Machiko, the only one who still wears a kimono instead of western dress and who is barely tolerated amongst them. Into this small community enters Shintaro, a veteran of the war and a violent thief whose domineering machismo instantly transforms him into the de facto leader they all feel compelled to impress. Reminded of her brother, Maya falls in love with him, but sees what can happen if she acts on her emotions when she and the others violently beat Machiko for not charging her favourite customer.
Things come to a head the night Shintaro brings home a stolen live cow, which he butchers in front of them. They trade the heart for alcohol and get very drunk. Maya gives into her feelings and makes love to Shintaro. Sen, the tattooed pre-Shintaro leader of the group, finds out and viciously whips Maya and convinces a local hoodlum that Shintaro has cheated the local gang on a deal. Shintaro is killed, a fact the badly beaten Maya only learns about when she finds his veteran flag floating in the harbour.
The year before Gate of Flesh was released, one of Hollywood’s greatest filmmakers made his own film about the world’s oldest profession, but Billy Wilder’s Irma la Douce would seem to bear little resemblance to Seijun Suzuki’s much more despairing film. In fact, it serves as a classic example of how ill equipped mainstream American movies were to tackle the controversial subject head-on as the studio system lumbered inexorably towards irrelevance.
Irma la Douce is a farce, starring Jack Lemmon as a French gendarme who loses his job when he messes up the arrangement between the local police and his neighbourhood’s working girls. Having no other options he ironically becomes the pimp for the film’s title character, Shirley Maclaine, with who he has fallen in love. Unable to stand the thought of her sleeping with other men, he creates a fake identity and becomes her only customer. Shenanigans then ensue (with a roadshow worthy running time of 147 minutes).
Made in an era where innuendo was still closely monitored and outright frankness verboten, Wilder’s film is a burlesque sapped of most of the good parts—a cartoon of the sex trade made in a place and time where the word “sex” still had to be whispered in polite company.
It would be years before Hollywood was ready to truly confront the realities of prostitution (even in 1969, as the studio system imploded and the flood of permissiveness started reaching everyone’s knees, Bob Fosse’s Sweet Charity—a musical remake of Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabria—changed Charity’s profession from streetwalker to taxi dancer*), which is a major reason why Gate of Flesh has the impact that it does. Though very much of its era, the Japanese film goes to places its contemporary Western counterparts could not.
This is true both spiritually (the film’s existentialist tone is more the stuff of low budget noir than studio melodrama) and graphically (it has boobies in it), yet the film exhibits an innate theatricality and visual style that gives it a patina of artificiality at odds with its implied mission statement. Though it seems to strive to be an unusually realistic depiction of prostitution following Japan’s defeat in WWII, there are times when the colours are just a bit too bright and one cannot help but think of Shirley Maclaine’s famous green stockings.
The question then is this: At what point does a film’s beauty begin to undermine the truth of what it presents?
With its vibrant palate, sweaty sensationalism and plot (charismatic ne’er-do-well tears apart ersatz criminal community) straight out of the studio suitcase, it’s really only the depth with which Gate of Flesh is willing to explore the truths of its characters’ circumstances that keeps it from feeling fraudulent.
Yet that depth is often—literally—skin deep. True to its title, there is a lot of flesh in the film, but—surprisingly—little of it comes from its characters’ business transactions. Instead, the majority of it comes from the extended beatings meted out on Machiko and Maya. It is in these scenes that the film descends into pure, undeniable exploitation. So much so that it feels as though they—and not an honest depiction of a tumultuous period in Japanese history—are the real reason for the film’s existence.
Such is the care with which these scenes are filmed—each emphasizing the physical beauty of the actors with shadow and colour—that they become tributes to the sadism of the moment rather than denunciations of it. Beauty undermines the truth.
But, then again, what are the truths at the heart of Suzuki’s film? That life after WWII was hard in Japan? That the poverty drove women to prostitution? That this life led them to become nihilistic and violent?
All of these are firmly in the “No shit, Sherlock” category.
At times the film risks being redundant—affirming conclusions any reasonable person could make on their own. Rather than create complex characters to enrich this rudimentary framework, it instead literally reduces them to colours. Maya is the one in green, Sen is the one in red, Machiko is the one in black and the other two might as well be interchangeable in their yellow and purple.
Yet the film largely works and succeeds at having an emotional impact despite itself, as there is always something compelling about the collision of ugliness and beauty. Art is always more interesting when compromised by the no-bullshit requirements of exploitation. A truly realistic depiction of this time and place would have been unbearably bleak and of interest only to those who confuse their misery boners with special insights into the human condition.
It’s no coincidence that by far the weakest part of the film is the one that tries the hardest to inject a note of existential horror into the story. In a flashback we see Maya lying violated in a field. Two American MP’s find her and leave her there, declaring to the black priest driving with them that a raped Japanese girl isn’t their problem. He stays with her and later in the film finds her out on the street, plying her new trade. He tries to get her to stop, but fails to convince her. Not long after, feeling betrayed by Shintaro’s going to bed with Machiko, she finds and seduces the priest—which directly leads to his committing suicide.
The largest problem with this subplot is a matter of language. While to western ears it’s much harder to tell the difference between a good and bad performance when given in Japanese, the terrible line readings by Chico Roman as the priest are immediately apparent and impossible to ignore. But ultimately that could be forgiven if the whole episode didn’t stink of laziness.
“Hey, this is really important because God and church and America and rape and sex and all that stuff!” the film seems to be shouting at us—its most obvious moment of pretension and the closest glimpse we get of what the film could have been without its exploitation heart.
Billy Wilder largely failed with Irma la Douce because (not for the first or last time) he replaced exploitation with tastelessness, thinking it made for a more palatable dish. With Gate of Flesh Seijun Suzuki avoids this mistake—understanding that by giving in to the lurid he could create an entertaining depiction of an experience cinema is largely helpless to truly delineate.
Light and darkness must work together. Truth without beauty is unendurable, beauty without truth is disposable. Balancing them is not for the weak, and Gate of Flesh does it well enough to earn 90 minutes of your time.
*See also this.