|
|
|
Play It Cool
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray A - America - Arrow Films Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (26th February 2025). |
|
The Film
 The daughter of aging, alcoholic nightclub hostess, eighteen-year-old Yumi (Hanzo the Razor: Sword of Justice's Mari Atsumi) has had to grow up fast, refusing to socialize with her female schoolmates in favor of doing small sewing jobs to support herself and her mother, and despising men like her mother's live-in boyfriend Yoshimura (Samaritan Zatoichi's Ryôichi Tamagawa), a door-to-door salesman who barely brings in any money. When her mother Tomi (Sex & Fury's Akemi Negishi) is out working one night – during which she puts off potential customers by getting drunk – Yoshimura rapes Yumi. When Yumi tells her mother, Yoshimura tells Tomi that he is sick of her and tries to forcibly take Yumi with him, resulting in Tomi stabbing him to death. Fearful for Yumi's reputation, Tomi swears her to secrecy about the rape and makes up a cover story for which she is sentenced to two years in prison. With limited possibilities for employment and needing to pay back Tomi's madame (Lady Snowblood's Sanae Nakahara) for her mother's bail, Yumi ends up working in her club as a hostess but her frosty demeanor intrigues more often than it repels (with the exception of one serious suitor who she frightens off by having him drive her to the prison to visit her mother). When Yakuza patron Kazuma (Violent Cop's Sei Hiraizumi) tries to rape her, Yumi is able to call the police and get him arrested. After Kazuma gets out of detainment, he and his brother cause a scene at the club and try to force the madame to compensate them for the embarrassment by letting them take Yumi to work at their club; however, Nozawa (Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II's Yûsuke Kawazu) steps in and pays them off before offering Yumi a more lucrative position in a Ginza club. Soon, Yumi is making good money – even mom is proud – but she feels more than indebted to Nozawa, a disbarred lawyer who has ended up the manager of a club under his Yakuza boss. When it comes to patrons who want her body, Yumi indulges in her only passion in poker in exchange for her body if they win. With Yumi drawing all of the rich and foolhardy clients, the other girls get jealous including the club's madame Yuka (Gamera vs. Guiron's Reiko Kasahara) – who is also in love with Nozawa and has noticed his attraction to Yumi – so she tips off the police about illegal gambling (which is more of a crime than prostitution). When Yumi confesses to Nozawa's boss Kada (High and Low's Kô Nishimura) just why she needs the money for her mother, he makes her an irresistible offer to become his mistress even though she has fallen in love for the first time with Nozawa. Predating the more violent and sexy excesses the studio would adapt the same year in response to the increasing popularity of pinku eiga films – independently-produced films of a violent sexual nature not unlike the American roughies of the same era – Daiei's Play It Cool is not exactly a Yakuza film or a youth picture so much as a melodrama set in the milieu of prostitution but one more contemporary than the brothels and geisha houses of some of the period pictures from the time (director Yasuzô Masumura had been an assistant on Kenji Mizoguchi's Street of Shame and had previously directed a segment of the anthology A Woman's Testament). Atsumi's Yumi is no ice princess but a young woman who is ashamed of her background not her passions which burn hot when she finds she is actually attracted to a man and otherwise deflected into high stakes games of poker; had the film been made a few years later, Yumi only being willing to surrender her body to someone who bests her in poker would be a pronounced sexual kink than a means of putting off the sexual act. The film's sexual content is restrained, with Atsumi not showing anything until her love scene with Kawazu on a revolving bed that seems to spin faster and faster to reflect her frenzy. Individual desires and a steadfast (and possibly self-punishing) sense of indebtedness in Yumi and Nozawa are such that when Yumi falls into a position where she is set for life, she does so to honor more than one debt only to realize that even with power she is stuck in a cycle of exploitation and would end up perpetrating it on others. Fortunately, the film does not throw in a last minute "moral" fate that punishes Yumi; although possibly leaving things open for the lesser-seen sequel The Good Little Bad Girl which brings back Atsumi as Yumi, the film's conclusion is downbeat but optimistic as Yumi sacrifices the happiness that would have resulted from a tainted relationship built upon the exploitation of herself and other women (including her mother). Despite it subject matter and tone, Play It Cool was a "lighter" work compared to director Masumura's previous film Blind Beast although he also worked in lighter fare like the crime film Black Test Car the satirical comedy Giants and Toys, the earlier, more taboo-busting Irezumi and the later, more explicit Hanzo the Razor: The Snare. 
Video
Unreleased theatrically in the West, Play It Cool makes its debut in the U.S. and the U.K. in a 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.42:1 widescreen encode, the deficits of which seem to be inherent to the source in the older anamorphic lenses and Daiei's slashed budgets which may have extended to the processing. Blacks are occasionally noisy but mostly deep, swallowing up detail in dark suits and black hair in the moody lighting of the nightclub and apartment interiors. What initially appears to be chroma noise in Tomi's white robe actually turns out upon closer inspection to be a light floral pattern in the material. 
Audio
The sole audio option is a clean Japanese LPCM 1.0 mono track that clearly renders the post-dubbed dialogue, spare effects track, and a music track that seems to consist solely of diegetic music rather than scoring. Optional English subtitles are free of errors. 
Extras
The film is accompanied by an audio commentary by critic and Japanese cinema specialist Jasper Sharp and professor and Japanese literature specialist Anne McKnight who discuss Masumura's career and how he had been denigrated next to his Japanese New Wave contemporaries because, despite the diversity of his work and its social themes. He was considered a company man who stayed at Daiei for fourteen years until the studio closed and had adapted to the studio's attempts to stay above water with the sexier, more violent films in his later filmography which contemporary critics and writers like Jonathan Rosenbaum and David Desser have sought to rehabilitate. They also discuss the film in the context of Masumura's treatment of women in his works and the loosley-related "mollusk" series of six films that were vehicles for Atsumi – noting that although the film has been known in English-speaking territories as "Play It Cool" the title actually translates to "Electric Jellyfish" with the previous entry translating as "Sea Anemone" and the follow-up in which Atsumi plays Yumi again as "Poison Jellyfish" – as well as the studio's and overall industry's poor treatment of Atsumi who survived an overdose before withdrawing from the public spotlight entirely.  "Too Cool for School" (46:07) is a new video essay by Japanese film scholar Mark Roberts in which he notes that while it is not always fruitful to discuss films in the context of an author's biography, here it does prove illuminating given that he was attracted to cinema during the silent era but gravitated away during the early sound era only to fall in love with French and German pre-war cinema which he found fun compared to theirs and Japan's post-war cinema. He was also torn between the film industry and the civil service, having received his law degree while working part-time as an assistant director at Daiei, returning to school for a philosophy degree and then putting off a career choice again to study in Italy for two years at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia where his more informal education among colleagues outside of class exposed him to film as an art form. In addition to providing an overview of his apprenticeships as an assistant and his early directorial efforts, Roberts also discusses the filmmaker's label as a "modernist" ascribed by Nagisa Ôshima (In the Realm of the Senses) as not in terms of cinematic tools of estrangement as in depicting Japanese postwar society as it was as a motivation for change rather than proposing an ideal. Of the studio's pre-pinku eiga turn towards the sexy and grotesque, Roberts reveals that Masumura attacked not his contemporaries but the conservatively-allied critics who dismissed the content rather than examining the sociological context (as well as the studios for embracing it for the bottom line rather than the reasons such content was popular with its audiences). He also provides more background on Atsumi who as a star was being paid a fraction of that of other leads and became so identified with the "mollusk" films that other studios were not interested in her when she refused to do nudity. The disc also includes the film's theatrical trailer (2:07) and an image gallery. 
Packaging
The first pressing comes with a slipcover, a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Tony Stella, and an illustrated collector's booklet featuring new writing on the film by Earl Jackson in which he, like his contemporaries, offers up alternate perspective of Masumura's later works as a continuation of his exploration of sex and society as well as suggesting that even in the "mollusk" films Masumura did not direct, Atsumi's innocent characters in being exposed to sexuality actually embraces her own rather than submitting to that of her seducers while the stigma was greater as an actor in the films rather than as a character (he also provides some more unpleasant details about Atsumi's offscreen life and her aborted attempt to return to show business).
Overall
Although far from the excesses of the near-contemporaneous studio adoption of the pinku-eiga into the mainstream, Yasuzô Masumura and Mari Atsumi prove that you can never Play It Cool with an "electric jellyfish."
|
|||||
|