Makers of movies about young toughs don’t need a direct acquaintance with the streets their heroes walk, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. The punk-on-punk battles of Miike Takashi’s Crows and Izutsu Kazuyuki Break Through! convince more because they are based on personal observation (if not always experience).
So it is with Gu Suyeon, like Izutsu of Korean ancestry and like Miike something of a wild child in his youth. His new film Hard Romanticker is based on a semiautobiographical novel he wrote about growing up in Shimonoseki, a tough port city on the strait between the main Japanese islands of Honshu and Kyushu.
Unlike some films in this genre that treat street brawls as a sort of comic contact sport, Gu’s take a darker, edgier tone, with violence shading into the sadistic and disturbing.
Its hero, played with casual authority and macho panache by Matsuda Shota, dishes out much of it, to a propulsive jazz beat and with flashes of black humor.
He is Gu, a bleached-blonde Shimonoseki native of Korean origin, which makes him a natural outsider in Japan’s still xenophobic society. In the opening scenes we see him navigating through a rough sea of punks and gangsters, beating some and fleeing from others.
The twisty plot features a shocking crime by two of Gu’s teenage acquaintances (Nakayama Kento, Emoto Tokio) that he unwittingly provokes, a glue-and-rape party that he rudely interrupts and the key a friendly gangster (Maki Kurodo) asks him to safeguard — and ends up causing him trouble.
By choice and chance, Gu becomes persona non grata in his hometown. Before his enemies can zero in, however, he lucks into a job as the manager of a nightclub in a town across the strait. He make a promising start, but his past, inevitably, draws him back across the water, with a savvy cop (Watanabe Atsuro) on his trail.
How can he triumph — or simply survive? Gu answers that question with an audacity that borders on the suicidal — and recalls similar characters played by Matsuda’s actor father, Yusaku. Also a Shimonoseki native with Korean ancestry, Matsuda Yusaku created his own indelible definition of cool three decades ago, culminating in his take-no-prisoner’s gangster in Ridley Scott’s Black Rain. In Hard Romanticker his son proves himself a worthy successor.
Mark Schilling