Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects (United States, 1989)

NOTE: While going through some old papers recently, I came across this, my first published film review, which appeared in the SF Weekly in February of 1989. It concerns the Charles Bronson vehicle KINJITE: FORBIDDEN SUBJECTS. if I was writing the review today, i would mention that the film was produced by Golan & Globus for Canon Pictures and that it was exactly the kind of film that those two entitites built their reputations upon, and that it was helmed by GUNS OF NAVARONE director J.Lee Thompson. I just didn't think at that time that there were people who cared about that kind of thing. I also would have mentioned that it features an early appearance by a shockingly fresh-faced Danny Trejo if I had been able to predict the advent of the MACHETE movies. Longtime readers of this blog will recognize that, despite the review clearly being written by a less experienced hand, there are certain stylistic through-lines, such as my taking every opportunity the movie offers to make jokes about butt sex. 

CHARLES BRONSON'S FACE, weathered and worn like that of some hellish apple head doll, is, though not exactly pretty, a fitting visage for a man burdened with the anxieties of an entire nation. As one of the media's most enduring personifications of American paranoia, Bronson has reduced his screen performances to a series of choreographed walk-throughs. Questions of role or motivation are irrelevant, as are charges of predictability: Bronson does not act, he performs ritual. Despite appearances, this is no easy job.It was inevitable that, sooner or later, Bronson's burden of projected anxieties would crack his mask of stoic brutality snd give us a brief glimpse of what these "wipe the scum off the streets" movies are really all about.

Kinjite, Bronson's latest vehicle, is a rote action film leaden with underdeveloped subplots and subtexts that give the film's action a backdrop of dizzying ideological ambiguity. After his daughter is molested by a Japanese businessman, an issue is made of Bronson's virulent anti-Asian bias. This racism, once explicitly stated, is never fully examined or resolved, and ends up being, if anything, an affirmation of popular anti-Japanese sentiment. Alongside this, some statement seems to be being made about American vs. Japanese sexual mores. This theme is ultimately abandoned, leaving in its wake a slag heap of sleazy visual residue. Any attempt to turn a Bronson film into a psychological thriller is doomed to fail miserably due to these films' necessary lack of characterization. in Kinjite, the only way we find out what a character is supposed to be thinking is through clumsy verbal exposition.

Kinjite"s most interesting "theme" is graphically introduced in its opening scene, in which Bronson, playing L.A. police Lieutenant Crowe, breaks into a hotel room occupied by a teenage hooker and her snotty, white collar john. After brutally subduing the john, Bronson demands that he make a statement identifying  the man who has been supplying him with teenage girls. When the john refuses, Bronson throws him down on the bed, vowing to give the scumbag a taste of his own medicine. As the john screams in protest, Bronson picks up his nasty looking, foot-long dildo and lustily rams his message home (ow!) The next day, Bronson expresses some reservations about the incident to his wife (played by The Mod Squad's Peggy Lipton.) Soothing him, she observes that the arrogant yuppy probably just got Crowe/Bronson's "Irish" up.

In a subsequent scene, the stirringly androgynous pimp, Duke (Juan Fernandez), gets a formidable rise out of Bronson's Irish when he attempts to bribe him with his diamond-faced Rolex watch. "I'd like to shove this up your ass," responds Bronson. "But I don't want to get my hands dirty." Instead, Bronson forces Duke to swallow the watch at gunpoint. Though it's hard to say why Bronson has suddenly gotten all picky about his orifices, the grueling watch swallowing scene, coupled with the earlier butt-reeming, provides a perfect exposition of the American action film's pornography of consumption (in the course of the film, Bronson--and Kinjite's producers--consume/destroy numerous cars, hotel lobbies and, at the climax, an entire shipyard.) Like most of filmland's pimps, Duke expresses his sexuality/power through his props, be they implausibly stunning young prostitutes or flashy wrist watches. When he actually has sex, it is a grim duty, a solemn rite necessary to the indoctrination of young girls into his harem. When Bronson forces the watch down Duke's throat, he turns this prop into the messenger of his own sexual power, just as he does when he violates the impotent john with his own substitute sex organ.

Obviously, in Kinjite, Bronson is finally giving his anxieties their most honest form of physical expression. His desire to literally fuck everyone is further exposed when, later in the film, his pastor suggests that his affections for his teenage daughter are something other than fatherly. "We all have our demons," he counsels.

Along with it's explicit and metaphorical depictions. bungholing is also paid a lot of lip service in Kinjite.  We hear of a young girl who has been raped and sodomized by Duke and his gang. Repo Man's Sy Richardson, tragically wasted here as Duke's monosyllabic toady, ogles a young man's behind as he speaks to Duke about branching out into the chickenhawk trade.

As for its treatment of "normal" (i.e. straight) sex, Kinjite provides little contrast to its lead characters' oddly motivated rectal preoccupations. The wives of Bronson and Hada, the Japanese businessman, are hollow and housebound, used mainly as expository devices. When Hada (James Pax) and his wife have sex, it is brief, joyless and almost entirely without movement. (This, presumably, is how Japanese people "do it.") When his wife asks him why,  after two years of abstinence, he has deigned to make love to her, Hada replies, "I guess because we are so vulnerable here (in America)."

Outside the home, all of the film's women are prostitutes. In this world, the only significant relationships are between male partners; Bronson/Crowe and his sidekick Rios (Perry Lopez) on the one side, Duke and his crony on the other. When these two couples get together, it's something like an overblown, tag-team bitch fight complete with pyrotechnics.

Unlike the film's other themes, which are dropped in favor of car chases and explosions, Kinjite's anal obsession carries through to its last frame.  In the final scene, Bronson, smirking triumphantly, leads Duke to his prison cell and introduces him to his bunkmate-to-be, a leering psychotic rapist. As Duke loudly protest his new roomie's advances, Bronson calmly walks away, almost wistful as he utters the film's final line; 'That's justice."

This vision of karmic justice meted out in buggery makes Kinjite a film that only an asshole could love.   

Humsaya (India, 1968)

Where would Bollywood be if not for the all-too-frequent occurrence of completely unrelated people looking exactly alike? It's certainly a situation we can all relate to. After all, who hasn't come face to face with their doppelganger on at least one occasion, and more likely two or three? Wait. What's that you say? It's not frequent at all? In fact, it pretty much never happens? Ha! Next you'll be telling me that women don't like being stalked, when in reality they take to it like catnip (if they were cats, I mean).

Humsaya begins with one of those disclaimers that assures us that any resemblance to any "living personalities or existing parties" is purely coincidental. From watching Tahalka and countless other Bollywood patriotic films, I've learned that what that really means is that the shit is on, and that, as soon as that disclaimer fades from the screen, we're going to be seeing some real life person, group, or country -- most likely Pakistan or China -- having their name thoroughly dragged through the mud.

And, sure enough, no sooner have those words receded from view than we are whisked via relief map to Peking, China, where Madan Puri, sporting offensive -if-it-weren't -so-ridiculous yellow face, is playing some kind of devilish top level Chinese government functionary. In furtherance of some dastardly plan to undermine India, Madan -- who's character, I believe, is named Professor Tao Kai Sheng -- puts out a call to Lin, a young Chinese military officer who, in response, is forced to cut short his leave. Bidding a reluctant farewell to his young sweetheart (played by Mala Sinha, doing her best impression of a gift shop China doll), Lin reports for duty, only to learn that he is to undergo plastic surgery in order to impersonate a young Indian Air Force officer by the name of Shyam. This surgery, however, will ultimately be less traumatic than one might expect, because Shyam and Lin are both played by Joy Mukherjee (who also produced and directed), and so will only involve Lin having the putty removed from his eyelids.

For reasons that are mostly too complex and unsubtitled to go into, Shyam, having somehow been duped into placing his fate within Prof Sheng's hands, is holed up in an isolated cabin somewhere in the Himalayas. It seems that back in India, Sheng, working behind the scenes, was able to frame Shyam for a murder he didn't commit, and as a result the lad was not only court martialed and stripped of his rank, but also alienated from the affections of his sweetheart, Rena (Sharmila Tagore). In this lowly and dispirited state, Shyam, now freed from prison, is putty in the Professor's hands.

That is, until Sheng and Lin show up at Shyam's cabin and Shyam inadvertently overhears the details of their dastardly Chinese plan, after which he manages to, without Sheng's knowledge, bring about Lin's death and switch places with him. Thus Shyam is now impersonating Lin impersonating him. Under this guise, he returns to India and tells all to his military superiors, after which his rank is reinstated, his conviction overturned, and his warm place in Rena's heart restored. Nonetheless, his superiors order him to continue his ruse in order to uncover the full extent of the dastardly Chinese's dastardly Chinese plot.

All goes more or less swimmingly until Professor Sheng shows up in India as part of a "Dancing Delegation" with Lin's sweetie, the delegation's star dancer, in tow. Of course, like Sheng, she also thinks that Shyam is Lin impersonating Shyam, and so comes to him on the sly expecting all of the benefits. Thus does Shyam's charade, not to mention his love life, become even more complicated, as Rena, like Lin's sweetheart, is unaware of the double role he's playing, which means that he must keep up appearances with the both of them while leaving neither of them the wiser about his relationship with the other. Spicy!

Of course, while Professor Sheng's Dancing Delegation is disguised under a cloak of peaceful diplomacy, it is in reality a festering web of virulent Chinese lies, intended only to facilitate his and his minions' trespass into India's brave but vulnerable heart. In hope of getting to and exposing the operation's real Mr. Big -- an especially circumspect soul who appears to his underlings both in a hood and silhouetted behind a screen -- Shyam must hit the road with the delegation, acting as their personal pilot, and race against the clock to complete his mission before the spies are able to do any irreparable Chinese damage.

As you have probably already gathered, Humsaya leaves no Orientalist cliché unturned. Boiled down to its essence, it would consist of nothing more than the serial sounding of gongs, the deferential shuffling of petal-like Chinese maidens, and sleeves creeping up to surreptitiously reveal previously unseen dragon tattoos as Madan Puri arches one brow and narrows his eyes in an attempt to convey inscrutability. Thankfully, all of this nonsense imbues the film with a level of entertainment that is far out of proportion to what the meat and potatoes of its story might otherwise provide, as, by all appearances, its a fairly rote Hitchcock-aspirant espionage thriller.

Of course, "by all appearances" is an important qualifier in this case, because, armed only with a typically breathless and garbled song booklet plot synopsis and exactly zero understanding of Hindi, appearances were all I had to go by. Thus any judgment of Humsaya I might make would be based on an incomplete understanding. Still, the degree to which it seems to conform to countless other nationalistic Bollywood potboilers that I've seen gives me the sneaking suspicion that, were I to have a complete understanding of its dialogue, it probably wouldn't have added that many additional layers of meaning to the movie as I experienced it.

On the other hand, there are certainly aspects of Humsaya that would prompt me to give it a re-viewing were it to come out in an English subtitled version (especially if it were released on a DVD free of the sound distortion that plagues the Priya VCD release, which sadly renders O.P. Nayyar's song score impossible to assess). Primary among those is the performance of Mala Sinha, who, over the course of the film, goes from China doll to full-blown tragic figure. It's a performance that threatens to crumple under its own bigness, but you sure can't accuse the woman of holding back. The fact that her agonized and quite lengthy third act monologue nearly brought me to tears myself, despite the fact that I didn't have the least clue what she was saying, is a real testament to the emotional power she brings to the role.

Humsaya wraps up with a sequence that would make Sunny Deol proud, in which Joy Mukherjee flies a helicopter over the Himalayas and, armed only with a machinegun and some hand grenades, single-handedly defeats an invading Chinese horde. Such a display of patriotism should serve as a humbling lesson to those us who gave ourselves a big pat on the back for merely dragging our sorry asses off the couch to go and vote back in November. This is true love of country, people! And Joy didn't even need Paris Hilton to tell him it was cool.

You call that a knife?