Yuzo Kawashima's Suzaki Paradise is an excellent film bordering on greatness. Actress Yukiko Todoroki’s Osami is the moral anchor for the lives that intersect at her tiny bar, and her performance is affecting, but it is Michiyo Aratama as the shiftless Tsutae that is truly compelling in a nuanced and deeply convincing portrayal as the drifter whore burdened by a decency she seeks to escape but always returns to. Her love for a loser is at bottom and all at once a glorious redemption and a prison. She is the new wave – a lost soul of the burgeoning metropolis – a beat. Kawashima uses brothel jazz on the soundtrack to insinuate this, and places his camera at ground level to look up at his protagonists in a disturbing new way. Aratama has the best line in the film: “You have to live until you die.”
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