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Zigeunereweisen

(1980)

Taishō Roman Trilogy

directed by Seijun Suzuki, 144 minutes

Winner of "Best Director" and "Best Film" at the 1981 Kinema Junpo Awards.

Maverick filmmaker Seijun Suzuki spent the 1960s concocting cockeyed masterpieces of yakuza psychedelia. With the ambitiously stunning ZIGEUNEREWEISEN, Suzuki inaugurated his legendary Taisho Trilogy and reincarnated himself as the auteur of modern Japanese art cinema. Set in a 1920s Japan saturated with decadence and nihilism, ZIGEUNEREWEISEN is the tale of a disparate quartet drawn together by unseen strings of fate and nearly driven mad by their own fears and desires. Aochi, a Japanese professor of German, vacations in a seaside town and discovers Nakasago, a former classmate, full-time vagabond and suspected serial killer. During their reunion, they both fall hard for the beautiful local geisha Koine. But when Nakasago marries and abandons eerie Koine-lookalike Sono, the men's mutual obsession for Koine escalates into paranoia and treachery spiked with undercurrents of witchcraft and the sinister presence of supernatural denizens. Titled after a Pablo Sarasate violin composition that haunts the film both narratively and aurally, ZIGEUNEREWEISEN was a smash hit on its native soil. The film snagged the 1981 Japanese Academy Awards for "Best Picture" and "Best Director" and was instantly established as both an essential work of the national cinema and the twisted magnum opus of the inimitable, go-go groundbreaker Suzuki.