{"id":4,"date":"2006-04-15T16:11:20","date_gmt":"2006-04-15T20:11:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/4"},"modified":"2026-05-25T23:10:38","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T03:10:38","slug":"kagero-za-1981-seijun-suzuki","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/4","title":{"rendered":"Kagero-za (1981, Seijun Suzuki)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>May 2026:<\/strong> Rewatched this (and the <a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/18516\">rest<\/a> of the Taisho <a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/18573\">trilogy<\/a>) for the blog&#8217;s <a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/18520\">20th<\/a> anniversary, since this movie was the very first post.<\/p>\n<p>Whole movie is dream-sequencey, walking the line beetween meaningful vital art and absolute goofball weirdness.  All three movies are homi-sui-cidal identity love triangles &#8211; this isn&#8217;t the longest, but the slowest and most fatebound.<\/p>\n<p>Our somnambulist hero is Japan&#8217;s coolest man, who I saw recently in <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/17841\">The Beast To Die<\/a><\/em>:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image26\/kagero1.jpeg\"><\/p>\n<p>25 years earlier, Mr. Tamawaki had his skin painted in <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/5246\">Kwaidan<\/a><\/em>:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image26\/kagero2.jpeg\"><\/p>\n<p>Tamawaki&#8217;s wife Ine is maybe part German, and probably a ghost.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image26\/kagero3.jpeg\"><\/p>\n<p>Among other things, they spend a long while looking inside hollow dolls like they&#8217;re sexy viewmasters.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image26\/kagero4.jpeg\"><\/p>\n<p><strong>original post:<\/strong><br \/>\nWonderful movie, maybe the best of the Taisho trilogy.  Starts and ends very free-flowing, dreamlike&#8230; little bit of storyline in the middle there.  Suzuki shifts to different scenes and characters within the same shot.  Lots of color, flowers, unexplained images.  Beautiful.<\/p>\n<p>Man with mustache and large hands apparently likes a girl who&#8217;s afraid of old women and cherries.  He also likes a german girl with her &#8220;hair in the japanese style&#8221;.  Or maybe they like him, or nobody likes anybody &#8211; I was mostly gazing at the flower petals, really.  A meddling mustachioed man with a hat and cane threatens everyone with his gun.  Maybe some or all of them die by the end of the movie.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image26\/kagero5.jpeg\"><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image26\/kagero6.jpeg\"><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image26\/kagero7.jpeg\"><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image26\/kagero8.jpeg\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>May 2026: Rewatched this (and the rest of the Taisho trilogy) for the blog&#8217;s 20th anniversary, since this movie was the very first post. Whole movie is dream-sequencey, walking the line beetween meaningful vital art and absolute goofball weirdness. All three movies are homi-sui-cidal identity love triangles &#8211; this isn&#8217;t the longest, but the slowest [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[357,110,36,120],"class_list":["post-4","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-1980s","tag-ghosts","tag-japan","tag-seijun-suzuki"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18644,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions\/18644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}