Obscure Japanese Film #4
At one point in Flic, a minor character says he
joined the police because he saw a French film called Un Flic (A Cop), thus explaining the title of this film. However, Masahiro
Kobayashi’s film has little in common thematically or aesthetically with Jean-Pierre
Melville’s ice-cool 1972 thriller, and the protagonist here, Detective Murata (Teruyuki
Kagawa), could not be further removed from the suave policeman played by Alain Delon.
Murata has not been to work
since the murder of his wife six months earlier. He has tried to resign, but his
boss won’t let him. His partner, Namekawa (Seiichi Tanabe), comes to his
apartment telling him it’s time to get back to work. Murata reluctantly agrees
to join him on an assignment to Tomakomai, an industrial town in Hokkaido, where they are
to meet the disabled brother of a murder victim and bring him to Tokyo in order
to identify his sister’s body. The victim had been killed with a chainsaw in a love
hotel shortly after arriving in Tokyo from Tomakomai, but the murderer is still at large. When they arrive in the town, Namekawa is keen to complete their
task as quickly as possible, but Murata goes beyond his remit and begins
conducting his own investigation. As Murata is the senior of the two men, there
is little Namekawa can do about this, even though the local police dislike such
interference. Things become complicated when Murata uncovers clues suggesting
that the woman may not have been the victim of a random psychopath after all.
However, he is also battling with his own demons – Murata is an alcoholic who
has been suffering from insomnia since his wife’s murder, and he finds it
increasingly hard to tell the difference between reality and the fantasies
playing out in his mind.
This is the kind of film guaranteed
to annoy those who like a conventional narrative with everything neatly
wrapped up at the end, but those open to something more ambiguous
should find this thoroughly absorbing despite the slow pace. Kobayashi
often keeps his camera on his actors when they’re not doing anything in
particular, and rarely uses close-ups. This has the effect of making you feel
you’re watching something real rather than a cleverly-staged scene. And while Flic cannot really be described as a
thriller, the story is certainly compelling and goes off in some unexpected directions.
It’s an unsettling film, thanks
in large part to Teruyuki Kagawa’s performance. As Murata, he is quite creepy
at times, and seems to be in such a pit of despair that social conventions have
become meaningless to him. He is rude to his colleagues, and tends to stand too
close to people, unnerving them with his thousand-yard stare. At one point there’s
a long-held shot of him staring directly at the camera which is truly haunting.
Presumably in order to
illustrate Murata’s fractured state of mind, Kobayashi uses repeated pan shots, some of which are exact repeats, some not. I don’t
think I’ve ever seen this disorienting technique in another film and, in fact, it’s difficult to think
of films with which Flic could be
easily compared, although there were certainly times when I was reminded of the
work of David Lynch.
A peculiarity of this film is
that it’s divided into two ‘chapters’, with the end credits sung by a lone
guitarist (Wataru Takada) at the end of each chapter. I’m uncertain whether the film was
originally released like this, or whether this is some kind of TV edit of the
film. At the time of writing, Flic
can be viewed with English subtitles on Youtube at the links below:
