Yaji X Kita (真夜中の弥次さん喜多さん) Review
[Having just seen the region one DVD release of Yaji and Kita: The Midnight Ramblers - and this is definitely the edition to get - I am reminded of just what a wildly tripped out film this is and am re-posting my earlier review with some comments on the R1 DVD added in.]
Where to even begin with this … Wildly anachronistic and anarchic Yaji X Kita – AKA Yaji and Kita, The Midnight Ramblers – is part samurai film, part slapstick comedy, part musical, and entirely surreal. The film is a trip both literally, as it is a road movie, and figuratively, as an awful lot of it is made up of drug and withdrawal induced hallucinations. And if all that wasn’t enough it’s also a gay love story.
The film begins in ancient Edo with the titular Yaji and Kita, a pair of low grade samurai, in Kita’s run down home. Yaji bolts awake from a nightmare to find Kita injecting heroin – and this is ancient Edo, mind you – and complaining that Yaji spends too much time with his wife. Yaji opens a letter to find a card extolling the virtues of the shrine at Ise and convinces Kita that if they make a pilgrimage there he’ll be cured of his drug addiction. The pair clasp hands, launch into a rousing round of Born to Be Gay, hop on a heavily customized motorcycle – again, this is ancient Edo – and set out for Ise. They’ve almost arrived when a traffic cop played by Susumu Terajima – also in period dress – pulls them over for breaking the speed limit, tells them off for riding a motorcycle when everybody from Edo walks and orders them to return to Edo and come back properly, on foot. Thus, the road trip begins again. By the time it concludes it will have taken them across the River Styx, to modern day Shinjuku, to inns run by singing transvestites and through a land governed by an iron fisted governor – played hysterically by tough guy Riki Takeuchi – who will only let people pass if he judges them funny enough.
As you may have guessed Yaji X Kita is a film that plays fast and loose with the rules of conventional story telling. Highly episodic, the film follows its own surreal logic as it leaps from one flamboyant set piece to the next. While a slapstick comedy on the surface if you scratch that veneer off just a little you find a piece very driven by questions of identity, perception, desire and reality. How does what we perceive relate to what is real? Can wanting something badly enough make it so? Kita, in particular, repeatedly rebuts the world around him by insisting that “That isn’t my reality” and forging ahead, following only his own rules. As Kita descends deep into withdrawal the film becomes increasingly hallucinatory and when he indulges in one king sized magic mushroom at the mid point – watch for the nod to Matango – the last vestiges of realism are entirely jettisoned. It certainly doesn’t make for easy to follow story telling, but treat it as a mix as desires, impulses and the subconscious brought into the conscious world and it follows a definite, if perverse, logic.
A film like this will succeed or fail largely on the basis of its characters. Both Yaji and Kita appear to be little more than one note caricatures through the first half of the film, constantly returning to the same conversations and situations, but they flesh out significantly in the back half. What holds your attention throughout, though, are the myriad of bizarre characters: Takeuchi’s regional lord, the girl so tone deaf she believes she brings her town bad luck, the flamboyant playboy police inspector, the scores of identical souls in the spa at the River Styx, the school girls in love with a small time gangster they’ve never met, the undead bartender … the list just goes on and on. The film is bright and colorful and filled with an undeniable, goofy charm.
Too strange to ever find a mainstream audience the question is whether or not Yaji and Kita can find a home in cult circles and, honestly, that’s a difficult call. There is definitely some meat on the bones, lurking quietly beneath the strangeness, but that may not be an entirely good thing. The ending takes a serious, albeit very strange, turn and I’m simply not one hundred percent convinced that there’s enough meat on the bones to deliver a solid meal. It tries to live in the same region between camp and serious art that Survive Style 5+ mined so effectively earlier in the year but the style is not quite as stylish and the depths not quite as deep. There are plenty of stellar elements in the film, stacks of memorable set pieces, but they never quite seem to come together into a consistent whole.
The recent DVD release from Media Blasters is excellent. Disc one features the film itself with an excellent anamorphic transfer – very likely a direct port of the Japanese release – with 2.0 and 5.1 sound options in the original Japanese with optional English subtitles. The second disc includes a lengthy reel of behind the scenes footage, fifteen minutes of deleted scenes, a goofy short film from director Kankuro Kudo, trailers, and more. Yaji and Kita is a completely unique film and this is very clearly the edition to have.
