Gate of Flesh

A group of prostitutes living among the ruins of postwar Tokyo have set their own rules: nobody works for free and nobody falls in love. Whoever breaks the rule is beaten. When a wounded soldier takes shelter with them, the order starts to dissolve. Seijun Suzuki directed for the Nikkatsu studio, from Taijiro Tamura's novel. Colour is the visual signature. Each woman is given one: red, yellow, green, purple. The framing and sets are built on those colours and realism is abandoned entirely. The ruins were built on a soundstage; canvas walls and a painted sky read openly as theatre. The subject is the collapse of occupied Japan: money, food and the body belong to the same economy. Suzuki was making cheap genre films for the studio in this period, and the result is a commissioned job turning into a purely formal experiment. Who it is for: viewers who like sixties Japanese genre cinema and stylised visual language. Who it is not for: anyone troubled by violence and sexual content; the film is harsh.