Play It Cool (1970): walking the fine line between melodrama and exploitation

The picaresque structure, in which a roguish but sympathetic hero moves through an episodic plot usually set in a criminal underworld, was used in early landmark novels like Don Quixote and Moll Flanders. It’s now used more in pornography than serious literature, but if that’s a fall from grace no-one has told the Japanese. One of the things that marks out the Japanese film industry as extremely different to most others is that notable directors can and do dabble in pornographic films without it leaving any stain on their career. The “pink film” is a tradition there, to the extent that when Nikkatsu revived their roman porno strand in the 2010s it became an opportunity for name auteurs like Hideo Nakata and Sion Sono to take a holiday.

Anyone trying to work out where the line is could do worse than look at the career of Yasuzo Masumura, a director whose films frequently return to themes of perversion and erotic obsession but who is not – even in this destigmatised industry – considered a director of pink films. Blind Beast and Red Angel aren’t cult classics or trash classics, they’re actual classics of Japanese cinema. While Play it Cool isn’t normally placed in their league, this Arrow Blu-Ray allows some insight into Masumura’s complex position in Japanese screen history, both in its supplementary features and in the film itself.

The story of Play It Cool is pure exploitation. It concerns Yumi, a virginal girl dragged into the underbelly of Japan’s bar scene after her mother is jailed for killing Yumi’s abusive stepfather. The treatment of this story is somewhat different. Despite its flip English-language title – very different to its Japanese title, as we’ll see – the mood is heavy, melodramatic, anguished. The first act of the film takes its cues from the performance of Akemi Negishi as Yumi’s mother, an alcoholic geisha coming to accept that her daughter has a brighter future than her. It’s a fantastic performance, deeply, painfully felt while also in keeping with the film’s heightened air.

Play It Cool is a more realistic film than the hallucinatory, hyperreal Blind Beast, but it still requires a steady sense of mood and tone. Masumura is a keen observer of end-of-the-’60s chic and nightlife, creating memorable compositions on a revolving bed and showcasing some of the worst dancing in cinema history. As Mark Roberts points out in an in-depth critical video in the extras, Masumura was once a massive outlier in Japanese cinema for this kind of forensic observation of working-class and underworld settings. By 1970, that was no longer the case; some of his early critical champions, like Nagisa Oshima, had graduated to directing hard-hitting films of their own. But Play It Cool is more than just an expose.

What, exactly, it is will depend on the viewer’s temperament. For a while, I was impressed with Masumura’s ability to find real psychological depth in a stock exploitation plot. Yumi’s suffering as she turns to the work her mother has built up a long-term psychological callus against is very affecting. Then the film springs its big plot idea: that rather than sleep with anyone who pays for her, Yumi will make herself the prize in a nightly card game. She sees this as a better deal than she was being offered, and in purely financial terms it is. But it’s hard to see what leads her to this decision, or why she seems to be enjoying it more. It’s an undigested nugget of pink-film silliness stuck in the throat of a sombre melodrama, and it makes the final act feel insincere.

The extras, at least, make a better case for the film than I could. Mark Roberts’s aforementioned video essay contextualises the complex, in-between position Masumura occupies in the eras of Japanese cinema. There is also a very in-depth and enthusiastic commentary from Jasper Sharp and Anne McKnight, which illuminates some of the film’s more enigmatic corners – not least its original title. Would you believe this film is known in its home country as Electric Jellyfish? After listening to Sharp and McKnight, you’ll not only believe it, you’ll understand it too.

Graham’s Archive – Play it Cool