Heroic Purgatory (1970)

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Director: Yoshishige Yoshida

Screenplay: Masahiro Yamada

Cast: Mariko Okada as Nanako; Naho Kimura as Jyoko; Yoshiaki Makita as Shu; Kaneko Iwasaki as Atsuko; Tôru Takeuchi as Kiyoshi; Kazumi Tsutsui as Ayu

Synopsis: When Kanako (Mariko Okada) encounters a young woman named Ayu (Kazumi Tsutsui), who survives a lengthy and direct fall onto concrete, she brings her back home to live with her and her husband Shoda (Kaizo Kamoda), who works for the Atomic Agency. A man claims to be Ayu's father, and from there the film switches back and forth in time as Shoda is involved with a communist cell planning an assassination, whilst Kanako and Ayu interweave through the eventual destruction of said cell.

Quite soon into Heroic Purgatory we are unstuck in time, to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, transitioning back and forth between 1952 and 1960, where the renewal of the Mutual Security Act ensured the continuing presence in Japan of the U.S. Army, and beyond to the 1980s and the unforeseen future. In-between a paranoid psychodrama takes place where reality is subjective, the slow dissipation of a communist group as a spy is sabotaging them from the inside, one which might not even exist in the first place. As the communist group plan to kill an ambassador, they fall to pieces over time as compromise and paranoia take over, the only ones who stand being Kanako herself and Ayu, who Kanako adopts as a quasi daughter figure despite being close in age.

Whilst it travels far from her and includes various other figures, ultimately Kanako is our closest thing to a protagonist. Even if the film lavishes time over the naked female body in the one aspect that may date the film - obsessed with its beauty in contrast to the ennui inducing environments - the female characters are the ones who drive the narrative. Kanako, staying out of the chaos that dooms her cell eventually , is more concerned her newly adopted daughter is missing at points whilst the communists, constantly charging her husband for being the spy, ignore her or say they cannot see Ayu. Who Ayu is - with her incredibly thin figure and strange manner, such as her desire to kill all potential father figures - is unknown, be she real or a living metaphysical entity. Whatever the case, its significant she bookmarks the film. That even if she's sexualised at points, including a reoccurring film within the film of Shoda touching her nude body in an isolated warehouse, she feels like a silent but dominant figure.

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The only actions of the men in Heroic Purgatory is mindless violence. Shootings. A gang rape of a female member of the communist group, never seen baring the aftermath and with the character yet reappearing to explain her death to her fellow communists. What appears to be death by strangulation in another scene is either botched or a mere act, the woman meant to be the victim nonchalantly dismissing the action as if nothing. Even the nudity, whilst the one thing which could detract from the film is more complicated due to the look and structure of the film. There was a potentially crass edge to older art films made by men from this era which intercut politics and philosophy with distanced titillation, but it drastically stands out here as, within the angular and cold environments, it drastically contrasts with the natural, curved and living figures of the female characters. The contrast is so strong, as the mechanical world around them seems more alien in contrast, especially as these female characters are those who ultimately stand out. They turn out significantly more stronger than their male peers doomed to paranoia and their codes.

The film belongs from the deep well of the Japanese New Wave, experimental and/or idiosyncratic films which fully fleshed out in the sixties into the seventies. Heroic Purgatory was produced by the Art Theatre Guild, formerly importers and distributors  of foreign films who came in this time to represent independent films as their mantra when they produced films like this. Like a lot of these films, they were made with incredible prowess. Director Yoshishige Yoshida is obsessed with the extremes of blacks and whites in the monochrome of the film. Michelangelo Antonioni is felt in his used of manmade locations (warehouses, modernist buildings) which dwarf the cast, but the extreme use of white to the point it drowns the images out is entirely Yoshida's own. These are the whitest of whites, to the point it disrupts the image but bleeding shape away through the blinding use of white light against black.

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Even for a bleak film in tone, the aesthetic is beautiful even if it's meant to show a phantom world in and out of time, characters dead appearing with the living to explain their deaths or conferences with the press playing out in an empty tennis court like an avant-garde theatre performance. The film's dislodging from time evokes author/director Alain Robbe-Grillet, who specialised in this fragmentation out of chronology, especially as characters can suddenly be transported from one environment to another with the same movement (i.e. lay on a bed, only to be transported outside laying somewhere else). The characters are our anchors for events as their world and behaviour change, fluctuates, painting a complex picture between them if the pieces are rearranged.

A dream logic which is yet incredibly precise and, like Robbe-Grillet, structured onscreen with an obsession with composition close to painting and the positioning of figures and environments within them. (This means a lot both for when sexuality does appear, like figures of life drawing figures having entered modernist architecture, or how surrealism manages to slip into the grounded realism of these industrial environments with ease). Like Robbe-Grillet, who liked to play with genre structure, there's a sense even if Yoshida made this film with greater concern for political concerns that he's lapping at the edge, like the sea on a beach, on the paranoia thriller as guns are fired and there is a spy who may not exist, as poignant as when Seijun Suzuki had the mysterious No. 1 assassin in both Branded to Kill (1967) and Pistol Opera (2001) - not quite the type of films to compare to Heroic Purgatory but, with the former from the Japanese New Wave, both obsessed with the idea of a threat which may be a mere fabrication but is still destructive, evoking God knows what subconscious moods of Japanese society at this period thinking of how politically volitile the era was with the likes of the Japanese Red Army eventually coming to be a year after Heroic Purgatory's release.

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The meaning of Heroic Purgatory as a whole is more than likely through mood - the centre of three films by Yoshida about ideologies. Eros + Massacre (1969), his most famous film, was about anarchism through free love advocate and anarchise Sakae Osugi. The last Coup d’Etat (1973) was about nationalism through real life ultranationalist Ikki Kita. Heroic Purgatory is about communism, and whilst not about real life figures it uses real like context to depict such a group eat itself alive. That its English title is "Heroic Purgatory" feels pertinent, these figures doomed in their belief to change the world for the better only to have wandered into these various time frames, dying or afraid of being killed because of spies within their own.

The film ends with Kanako and Ayu at a literal dead end on a train station platform, and whether you fully grasp what happens, it feels like both women walk off having to find new purpose. The film throughout strips away what was presumed before. Where religious beliefs are questioned, science and Shoda's goal to innovate in technology useless and made obsolete the moment its born, and in whatever time frame the film takes place in the communists self destruct. It's both a bleak ending, yet considering how surprisingly dominant the female figures are within this tale, the two most distinct figures are the ones who start the film and end it, making something if not hopeful at least with the concept that new goals are to be found for the mother and adopted daughter beyond the film.

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Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Expressionist/Introspective/Mindbender

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High

Personal Opinion:

Difficult but with purpose, Heroic Purgatory having been made not so long after the Sixties feels like the dissection of what took place to communism as a principle within that time. A compelling one, one which I openly admit qualifies for the term "pretentious" were it not for the fact that it actually has an incredible sense of intelligence to it. Artistically alone, it's a work of art but also as an entirely constructed work which plays with narrative and logic, the craft's flawless and to be of awe with.

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