Fantasia 2024 Review: TATSUMI, A Gritty Yakuza Street Drama With A Broken Heart

I am happy that these kinds of gritty, but emotionally tragic crime films are still being made. Hiroshi Shôji’s Tatsumi is one of those skuzzy neighborhood dramas, the kind soaked in poverty, spit, blood, and tears. Where the crime feels more senseless and desperate than ever, and yet, an unlikely set of genuine relationships evolve out of the mess. The violence is not so much the point, nor is it gratuitous, but rather it is the syntax to make the audience feel the astringent carnage inherently in it. And, here, to contrast it with a burgeoning platonic love between the two central characters, the eponymous Tatsumi, and teenage mechanic tomboy Aoi. 
 

Tatsumi has a boat, and some small claim to a patch of water for commercial fishing. This business exists, however, mainly as a front for his more lucrative side-hustle of disposing of corpses for two local, and rival Yakuza outfits. One is run by muscular heavy Goto, the other by the quieter and more machiavellian Skipper. Tatsumi is loyal to neither of these smalltime-bosses, but does work for both.

Tatsumi in many ways is analagous to the Toshiro Mifune’s ronin character in Yojimbo, only he is fixed in essentially one city block for life. He cannot wander, yet serves as the last man of honour & humanity in a sea of loud, but painfully diminished, thugs who can only project that kind of strength through machismo and the pettiness of unspoken gangster codes.

 

He plies his grim trade by cutting off finger tips, removing teeth (both shown in clinical efficiency, not unlike gutting fish) and burying the remains under broken cars in a wreckers yard. Tatsumi literally knows where all the bodies are buried. Both Skipper and Goto court him as a full time employee (in their parlance: family member), to hinder their rival from hiding the evidence of their crimes.

When Tatsumi’s brother dies of an overdose from some stolen meth, it kicks off an opening credit sequence that mimics high contrast black & white crime-scene glossies, that foreshadow the inevitable, but profoundly sad, cycle of violence between the two gangs.

Through his rather specialised talent, or because of it, the world feels like Tatsumi versus the chaos of the streets. There is an ever increasing pile of murdered bodies, with Aoi, and himself, hovering in the eye of the storm. As Marge Gundersson in Fargo put it in such resigned, and melancholic, terms, “And for what? For a little bit of money? There's more to life than a little money, you know. Don'tcha know that? And here ya are, and it's a beautiful day. Well. I just don't understand it.”
 

Aoi’s employer Yamaoka is suspected to be involved in the theft of the meth, he is also her sister, Koyoko's husband. Small place. Both Skipper and Goto send their people to deal with the Yamaoka, and his by proxy, his wife. Bad things happen. Badly. It takes a bit to get to know all the supporting players in Tatsumi, however, it is easy to grasp the central relationship between Tatsumi and Aoi. Watching the increasingly terminal situation, the people, and the bitter outcomes spin around this couple that, even though they themselves are in many ways also far from 'good' people, it is easy to root for some kind of an out for them; a solution to a problem that stubbornly refuses resolve. The film resolutely refuses to be anything like a noir though, under the surface things are more black and white than murky grey.

Happiness does come in quiet moments between violent episodes. And Hiroshi Shôji includes many of these to allow the tug-of-war between Tatsumi and Aoi. How their different methods create a symbiosis, and path through the middle, binding them together in slow motion.

 

Despite its blood and grease-soaked trappings, Tatsumi uses familiar genre beats to tell a distinctly non-genre story. It does so with its own kind of frenetic grace. It wants you to feel its emotional pain. It even verbalizes it at one point, “Emotion will make you fail.” But emotion is everything here, and the film is very effective at juggling so many things on the axis of the central couple.

 

The secret MVP of the film, however, is the movie's location scout. Like some of those early Michael Mann, James Gray, or Nicolas Winding Refn pictures, Tatsumi takes place in all manner of iconically crime locales:  Dockyards, industrial gravel pits, parking garages, fishing warfs, car wreckers, abandoned fields outside of town, and un-shingled back alley restaurants. The latter of which doubles as a neutral ground where gangsters parlay while being stitched up by an unlicensed doctor. The fluctuation between ultra tight spaces like the tiny restaurant or mechanic garage, and the wide open rural lots keeps the movie visually interesting, and also tells its own kind of story.

While the camera for the most part has an intensely saturated look under sodium vapour light, and uses jarring, handheld close-ups to convey the savagery and violence. This is at odds with the more clinical body disposal, or harsh natural sunlight in more open spaces where it is precise, and stable. Tatsumi is a professional in his craft, even if his personal life gets the better of him. The filmmaking does a good job conveying these distinctions via several visual styles. The shots of these blue-collar places are staged as the gunfights are in a classic American western; even if knives are the main tool of the trade here. While the movie takes place entirely at street level, in the gutter as it were, the final moment of the film is a quiet stunner. It allows you to quietly wallow emotionally, from an elevated position, on what the film has wrought.



Tatsumi is a diamond in the rough, in many ways a masculine classic with a pumping heart, but it is dressed up in manner to disguise the fact.