The Cinematheque

“Almost perfectly recaptures the look of Japanese underworld films of the 1950s and ​’60s, like Naruse Mikio’s When a Woman Ascends the Stairs and Kurosawa Akira’s High and Low.”

Dave Kehr, The New York Times

Gleefully cinephilic and self-aware, this inaugural entry in Hayashi Kaizo’s Maiku Hama trilogy sets down the rules of play (emphasis on play) for the entire pastiche-laden neo-noir saga. Winking at the audience from the outset, it opens on a would-be client forced to buy a movie ticket to see Maiku Hama (“my real name,” the detective insists). That’s because the hipster PI (Nagase Masatoshi) operates his agency from inside a cinema—his shoddy office adjoined to the projection booth! Less a hard-boiled gumshoe than a cartoon cosplaying one, he’ll proceed to lose a pinky in a misjudged act of chivalry and repeatedly get his ass kicked over the course of the retro-coded monochrome film. He’ll also be comically edged out of his own narrative when the search for a missing Taiwanese man segues into a Yokohama turf war between pan-Asian gangs. Operating squarely in the Nikkatsu ​“borderless action” tradition, the first chapter in the Maiku Hama series is a punky, irreverent hoot.

In Japanese and Mandarin with English subtitles