Sydney Pollack: The Yakuza
Before I get started with The Yakuza, I should point out that two things have been very clear
in the three films – They Shoot Horses Don’t
They?, Jeremiah Johnson, and The Way We
Were – I’ve covered in this retrospective so far: one is that more than
anything else, Sydney Pollack is a director that makes no bones about the fact
that he is more interested in the performance of the actor than the art of the
director; the second thing is that no matter what kind of story he is telling –
be it Depression-era drama about dance marathons or Transcendentalist westerns
or political thrillers (more on that next week) – he’ll always make time in his
films for human relationships, specifically the relationships between men and
women.
I bring this up because in 1975, Pollack released two genre
films that seem like departures for the director and the very thing he values
most in film; however, if you look closely at both The Yakuza and Three Days of
the Condor, you’ll see that even amidst the action and chases and confusing
screenplays, there’s always a languid moment here and there – despite what the
film is really after – to connect lonely,
singular individuals. There’s always a goal to connect the protagonist with
something – women/men, nature, vocation – of meaning (so I guess it’s safe to
call Pollack an Existential filmmaker of sorts). The reason for this is simple:
Pollack claimed once in an interview that the relationship between humans (men
and women especially) interests him more than anything else because “it’s a
metaphor for everything else in life.” So even The Yakuza, a Sydney
Pollack film that doesn’t really feel all that much like a Sydney Pollack film
(it’s more of a genre film), there are quiet moments where the characters are
allowed to talk and exist, however briefly, in a less chaotic world than the
one they normally inhabit.
