V-Cinema Essentials 4: Carlos

Onwards we go in our V-Cinema exploration of the recent(ish) V-Cinema Essential boxset with Carlos, a 1991 video release from Kazuhiro Kiuchi. I’d actually started it one evening, I immediately liked it but being of a sleepy disposition set it aside for another day, one where the brain and the body were more in harmony. Finally, popping the disc back into the player a few days later, the question was whether or not the film would live up to the few minutes I'd already seen. 

Generally speaking, yes. 

Japanese-Brazilian yakuza, Carlos (Naoto Takenaka) is hiding out in Japan, having warred with the Columbians. A chance killing leads Carlos to make the best of the feud between local Yamashiro and Hayakawa families, only things don’t always go the way Carlos plans... 

It all starts with a stylish introduction where Carlos offs a couple of Yamashiro goons he’s been working with but owe him money. This is no spoiler, you see it coming, but it’s tightly filmed: sharp cutting mixed with intriguing angles. But mainly it highlights Carlos and, in Takenaka’s performance our anti-hero is one who moves effortlessly between a light breeziness and the face and actions of a man you think would happily chop up his own mother and feed her to his pet piranha. It sums up the mood of the film too, and director Kiuchi moves between the tonal shifts with skill. These are most certainly virtues, as is the cinematography from Seizo Sengen (responsible for excellent work on the recent The Beast to Die), who often conjures images that – like Carlos towards the finale in the lift, shot from below, harsh lights either side of him – that are anything but lazy.  

The story itself is relatively rote; the Yamashiro boss assuming that Hayakawa is responsible for the death of his goons gives him the reason to finally have his nemesis murdered - but wait, there’s more! Layer onto this that the very same boss has a health problem and whoever offs Hayakawa will become the new Yamashiro boss... well, you can imagine the plotting, the connivances, the old grievances suddenly bobbing up the surface that this would conjure up. Here it all works because in the midst of it is Carlos, his brother, the stoney-faced possibly psychotic Goro, and a motley band of murderers forged in unforgiving violence against the Columbian cartels. They are the X-factor that imbalances the precarious state of the local yakuza, eyeing the opportunity for power and money but also for violence; these outsider yakuza are not traditional in the least, they play by rules that are not so much different as they are adjacent. They are removed from Japan and it's associated gangster norms. 

Yet the film (as noted) has moments of lightness. Carlos and Goro visiting the family after nearly two-decades, a young cousin semi-flirting with the po-faced Goro, but here as with everything there is a sense of submerged violence that constantly threatens to bubble up - not directly at their family, but they always need to leave and can never eat a meal there. There's always more work.  

And as previously mentioned, it’s with Carlos where that violence is most noted, and Naoto Takenaka really does excel in the role. Though we may cut away to scenes within the Yamashiro family headquarters or towards other scenes, it’s always to Carlos that the film returns and he is the creature at the centre of it. But that he is no rabid dog matters. There’s enough sophistication of characterisation here and a performance to match to ensure that nothing becomes generic and he's utterly convincing. You can imagine him having murdered members of a Columbian drug cartel as well as Brazilian police officers,  but he can be kind and thoughtful to his aunt and cousin. It's hard to imagine him not surrounded by violence, but he's more than just a crazed villain despite this.

Carlos as a film is never generic. The simplicity of the plot allows for Carlos the character to be fleshed out and the outbursts of yakuza violence to be brutal and brutally effective. There is the odd moment where perhaps the script could have been a little more polished: Carlos left to be beaten to death by only one person and oops his handcuffs breaking is rather eye-rolling but these are mere trifles when you consider the stylish and effective 90-minutes that the film provides. 

Carlos is not a film that reaches for the stars but aims to give us a taut yakuza thriller and in that it certainly delivers, and there’s something to that purity of purpose that some other films should stop, look and learn from.