‘Ever seen a one-armed man pump a shotgun?’ – First Love review

Ever seen a one-armed man pump a shotgun? It involves chucking the heavy weapon in the air and catching it by the barrel on the way down. Sure, it would be a lot easier, logistically speaking, to use a pistol or an uzi instead. But somehow that wouldn’t be as fun. Elaborate, funny, violent, our one-armed gangster is as good an image as any to sum up the tone of Takashi Miike’s First Love: this is boy meets girl, juggled with the chaos of a sprawling yakuza caper.

Ever seen a one-armed man pump a shotgun?

Said boy is Leo, a young boxer with an inoperable brain tumour — read: nothing left to lose. All the characters are cut from type, and Leo is one of those boxers who, like Rocky before him, is fighting to prove to himself that he’s worth something. Said girl is Monica (damsel/distress) who does a good line in whimpering. She’s one of those meth addicts, forced into sex work by yakuza gangsters, who keeps hallucinating her abusive father wearing nothing but sunglasses and tightie-whities. You know the ones.

So now we need a meet-cute. When Monica hallucinates one of her johns as her father, she makes a run for it — only, unbeknownst to her, the john is really a crooked cop, who is in league with Kase, one of the yakuzas, and the pair are planning to purloin a large drug shipment and use her as a scapegoat (told you Miike had a taste for the elaborate).

Leo, on the same street, looks up from under his moody fringe to see Monica running towards him, crying for help. Leo — being the decent, desperate guy that he his — punches out her assailant. Thus the pair are entangled in the deal-gone-wrong, and its bloody, unfurling aftermath. Add some triads into the crossfire, just in case the set-up isn’t prolix enough, and you’re golden.

Long before the film breaks into a whacky animated sequence near its climax, it’s marked by the kind of overblown, sadistic violence you’d expect of a cartoon. A decapitated head rolls, still blinking, into an alleyway. A wind-up puppy triggers an explosion. A gangster has his shooting arm cut off by a katana and tries to pry his gun free from his once-fingers. In First Love, blood doesn’t drip; it erupts in far-fetched, escapist fountains.

A decapitated head rolls, still blinking, into an alleyway. A wind-up puppy triggers an explosion. A gangster has his shooting arm cut off by a katana.

Graphic violence here is less horrifying than used to punctuate a steady train of punchlines — see the female assassin who gets carried away curb-stomping the man she’s supposed to be interrogating (‘You don’t get out of this by dying,’ she yells at the corpse, delivering one final kick for the road). Or Kase about to drive the front wheel of his jeep over a fellow yakuza’s head (‘Fuck, how many does this make today?’) For viewers still unsure whether to laugh or squirm, Kôji Endô’s jazz-rock score steers the zany, gonzo energy into overdrive.

With over 100 film credits, and a back-catalogue that runs the gamut from horror to family-friendly fantasy, you’re never quite sure what to expect from a Takashi Miike film. Though blood spatter is normally a good bet. Mayhem is another.

Though blood spatter is normally a good bet. Mayhem is another.

While Leo and Monica are too archetypal for a sincere investment in their romantic arc, they’re a welcome addition to the ironic carnage. Even as they fall for each other body and soul, the real catharsis, passion and enjoyment is found in the body count.

After a long and murderous night that they’ll never forget, the young lovers retire to a copy-paste apartment. For me, the real sailing-into-the-sunset moment comes in another of the film’s final images. A yakuza boss is driving over a seemingly never-ending bridge, chased by a ceaseless stream of police cars. Takashi Miike having long been a pioneer in gokudō (direct-to-video yakuza films), the scene reads like a lament — the good old days of honour and humanity in the yakuza are sailing away, while the current era is dominated by modern gangsters solely concerned with money.

For me, the real sailing-into-the-sunset moment comes in another of the film’s final images.

Ultra-violence in First Love is about getting a piece of the pie, not about cleaning out the neighbourhood’s even dirtier dirtbags. You get the sense that the real love affair here is between a director and a genre — one that seems less and less viable, except in a period setting. As Cat Stevens says, the first cut is the deepest.