Anything But Silent
Yasujiro Ozu's
Dragnet Girl (Hijosen no onna)
with live accompaniment from Coupler
Thursday, April 11th at 7:30
$11 Members | $16 Public | Free for Young Film Fan members!
The Sky Room Cafe will be closing at 5 PM the night of this event.
A mesmerizing new electronic music score by Coupler highlights this rare screening of Yasujiro Ozu's stylish thriller about a gangster whose search for redemption with the inadvertent help of an innocent shop girl provokes the jealousy of his longtime girlfriend.
This accomplished and psychologically complex gangster tale pivots on the growing attraction between Joji, a hardened career criminal, and Kazuko, the sweet-natured older sister of a newly initiated hoodlum—a relationship that provokes the jealousy of Joji’s otherwise patient moll, Tokiko, who is determined to win Joji back no matter the cost. With effortlessly cool performances and visual inventiveness,
Dragnet Girl is a masterpiece from
Yasujiro Ozu. Although
Ozu's reputation as one of the greatest filmmakers in history is mostly based on his quiet dramas about Japanese family life like his legendary 1953
Tokyo Story (rated third in the most recent British Film Institute poll of the greatest films of all time, a number of his early classics were stylish crime thrillers like the brilliant
Dragnet Girl.
(Japan, 1933, 100 mins, NR, Silent with English Intertitles | Dir.Yasujiro Ozu)
Coupler is less a band than a creative organization. Founded in 2011 by Lambchop veteran Ryan Norris, its core is Norris along with Rodrigo Avendan~o and Rollum Haas, though its membership has at points swelled to as many as eight. At its root, the project is an exercise in mutual cooperation of creative individuals and is an exploration of the intersections of man and machine, live and recorded, composed and improvised, stasis and flux. Their latest release, Gifts from the Ebb Tide, sits at the center of several records that were gestating concurrently and shares DNA with each of them: HeCTA’s The Diet, Lambchop’s FLOTUS and Coupler’s Blue Room Sessions.