Review: First Love Is a Well-Oiled Genre Machine, As Bloody As It Is Haunting

First Love reveals itself to be an elegant and haunting Takashi Miike film in throwaway clothing.

First Love
Photo: Well Go USA

Takashi Miike’s First Love shuffles between slapstick and disturbing violence with fluid ease. The film’s plot suggests an unpromising blend of a ’50s noir and a ’90s-era Quentin Tarantino joint, as it involves a variety of derivative genre types who’re sent on a collision course via a requisite drug scam gone wrong. For a while, Miike and screenwriter Masa Nakamura occupy themselves with setting up the film’s elaborate domino-effect-like structure, crisscrossing between half a dozen nearly self-contained stories of yakuza warfare, Chinese criminals, crooked Japanese cops, and wronged women on a warpath. Pointedly missing here is the gleefully unhinged sense of humor that typically marks Miike’s yakuza films, but as the plot coalesces, the filmmaker’s long game grows increasingly rewarding, and First Love reveals itself to be an elegant and haunting Miike film in throwaway clothing.

Leo (Masataka Kubota) is First Love’s most sentimental and least interesting hero, a gifted boxer who’s often lectured by his trainer for lacking a competitive edge. This notion of a man of promise who’s unable to fulfill his potential is amusingly rhymed with the plight of a coterie of yakuza killers, who bemoan their dwindling power and necessary collaboration with other gangs. The rhyming structure is bluntly asserted when Miike cuts from Leo punching an opponent to a head as it’s sliced off on a random street via a sword. This beheading is staged in Miike’s customarily flippant comic style, as if to say “murder’s a boring and tedious matter of business.” For a filmmaker who so often gets off on violence, Miike has a wonderful, nearly unparalleled ability to throw away a violent bit for the sake of a punchline.

For reasons that require less explication than the film offers, Leo gets entangled in a conspiracy engineered by Kase, a midlevel Japanese criminal who serves as a link between the yakuza and drug dealers, and who’s played by Shota Sometani in a performance of deranged and freewheeling grace. Sometani renders Kase a kind of criminal yuppie, betraying dangerous people in a blasé manner. The joke, one of First Love’s best, is that Kase’s slimy, white-collar-feeling betrayals often involve brutal murders born of unexpected complications, which he orchestrates with a matter-of-fact self-absorption that grows funnier and funnier as the film’s fuse becomes shorter. In one of the most hilarious sight gags in Miike’s vast canon, Kase attempts arson with a trap that involves a little plastic dog that’s been rigged to stroll into and ignite a pool of gas. Once again, Miike doesn’t emphasize the humor in all caps, staging it with a casualness that suggests the inherent insanity of mercenary life.

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First Love is a one-thing-after-another, night-in-the-life crime comedy that gradually becomes ineffably serious and haunting. This sort of transition, a specialty of Miike’s, is signaled early on with sequences that disrupt the film’s tone of chaotic revelry. Leo meets Monica (Sakurako Konishi), a prostitute enslaved by a drug dealer connected to the yakuza, and who’s haunted by hallucinations of the corrupt father who abandoned her. When we first meet Monica, she’s trying to escape the drug dealer’s apartment, and the bed sheet she’s left on the floor rises off the ground, chillingly assuming human form. The film’s bringing together of a young man and a prostitute with a heart of gold may be an ancient, indestructible cliché, but such sequences revitalize First Love’s tropes and give them urgency. And this urgency grows as the yakuza carnage continues, its senseless endlessness becoming less absurd than tragic.

Unlike many practitioners of this sort of pulp narrative, Miike and Nakamura understand that the film’s McGuffin—in this case the bag of drugs—doesn’t matter. Kase and the yakuza and the Chinese gangsters may be chasing the booty, but the latter is an excuse for frustrated people to do what they wanted to do anyway: kill one another. Killers keep pouring into the film, and it’s sometimes difficult to tell them all apart, but Miike frames the most important characters in stylish poses that give them, and First Love at large, a comic-book grandeur—an association that’s literalized when the director audaciously segues into animation in order to realize a huge stunt that was almost certainly beyond his budget if it were to be staged for real. First Love climaxes in a department store with two men, one Japanese, one Chinese, beating and cutting each other senseless, which Miike allows to unfold at brutal length, effectively suggesting that all these genre mechanics, all the romantic window dressing, come down to this: the bloodlust shared by characters and audience alike.

Score: 
 Cast: Masataka Kubota, Shôta Sometani, Sakurako Konishi, Becky, Sansei Shiomi, Seiyô Uchino, Takahiro Miura, Cheng Kuo-Yen, Chun-hao Tuan  Director: Takashi Miike  Screenwriter: Masa Nakamura  Distributor: Well Go USA  Running Time: 108 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2019  Buy: Video

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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