Capone Cries a Lot

In this underseen late-career masterwork from Seijun Suzuki (Branded to Kill, Tokyo Drifter), Kaeimon (Kenichi Hagiwara), 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. Capone Cries a Lot is a boyish gangster film in air quotes: a parodic carnival reflecting on the intersection between American and Japanese imperialism, iconography and power. Shot in Japan, around 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 reflect Suzuki's understanding of US politics) and reverential (folding jazz, blues, traditional Japanese performing arts and Charlie Chaplinesque slapstick into one aesthetic continuum). All in, it brings Seijun Suzuki’s “borderless” aesthetic project full circle.