The ScreenAnarchy curated
Tokyo Drifters: 100 Years Of Nikkatsu screening series continues at the TIFF Bell Lightbox this Saturday with a rare screening of Kawashima Yuzo's
Suzaki Paradise: Red Light District. Considered one of the greatest Japanese films of all time by a master filmmaker largely overlooked in the west,
Suzaki Paradise will screen from a subtitled 35mm print and you can win tickets now!
A more sombre offering from Nikkatsu, Yuzo Kawashima's Suzaki Paradise: Red Light District
offers an unsparing look at postwar poverty and desperation. Young
married couple Tsutae (Michiyo Aratama) and Yoshiji (Tatsuya Mihashi)
arrive in Tokyo with little more than the clothes on their backs and
take up residence just outside Suzaki, one of Tokyo's most notorious
red-light districts. Lusting after the high life, Tsutae scorns
Yoshiji's attempts to try to scratch out an honest living, and is soon
drawn across the bridge into the beckoning pleasure centre, where she
sets out to make a living off her looks. Regarding its rootless,
weak-willed protagonists with remorseless clarity and a bracing lack of
sentiment, Suzaki Paradise: Red Light District is another
triumph from the great, perpetually overlooked master Kawashima, and was
voted along with Kawashima's following film The Sun in the Last Days of the Shogunate (also screening in this series) as one of the best Japanese films of all time by leading Japanese film magazine Kinema Jumpo.
We've got two pairs of tickets to give away for the screening and
all you need to do for a shot at them is email me here and say you want in on the Nikkatsu ticket giveaway!