The mononymic Japanese director SABU, despite 30 years of steady work in the offbeat genre film mines, has never broken through in the West in the way his near-contemporaries Takashi Miike, Shinya Tsukamoto, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, or the older but spiritually akin Takeshi Kitano have at times. His Miss Zombie got a little press back in 2013, and this writer fondly remembers his Mr. Long, with Chang Chen as a hitman-turned ramen chef from 2018. SABU (born Hiroyuki Tanaka) is probably better known in the West for his small acting roles, playing a henchman in Miike’s Ichi the Killer and Samurai #1 in Martin Scorsese’s Silence (two films which also starred Tsukamoto and Tadanobu Asano, but which otherwise have very little else in common). But mostly he seems to have carved out a career of moderate success at home and a guaranteed spot at major international film festivals abroad.
SABU’s latest would fittingly be right at home among the recent films of Miike or Kitano, a clever parody of action film cliches which, like Mr. Long, owes more than a little to the work of Johnnie To. But where that earlier film was reminiscent of To’s little seen 1999 film Where a Good Man Goes, the director’s new one, Arrested Memory, about a cop who is losing his memory, immediately calls To’s 2009 film Vengeance to mind (so to speak). Taiwanese actor Ethan Juan plays the cop, seen undergoing some kind of episode in the film’s opening operation, which results in the death of his entire crew. Sometime later he’s put in charge of a kidnapping case, bringing the money to the drop and promptly forgetting why he’s there. This kicks off a classic One Crazy Night scenario, wherein Juan wanders the streets meeting incompetent gangs, goofy drug dealers, scary yakuza, and damsels in distress, bumbling his way through to saving the day with a lot of running, a few drinks, and a heck of a lot of judo flips (reminiscent as well of To’s Throw Down).
The various characters he meets, those chasing him and those he doesn’t know, are as colorful as the movie itself, drenched in reds and greens and blues — a nightclub dance sequence (of course there’s a dance sequence) is particularly vibrant. A suicidal girl with a sad home life, played by Moon Lee (the young Taiwanese actress, not the Hong Kong action star of the ’80s and early ’90s — let’s call her New Moon Lee) proves to be his spiritual counterpart, and gives the film its slight touch of quirky romance, along the lines of Miike’s great One Crazy Night adventure First Love. But Juan remains lost throughout the film, driven by the holes in his consciousness which are all-too-readily filled by the ghosts of his fallen fellow cops.
One might ask why a cop undergoing severe mental lapses of memory and consciousness would choose to remain on the job and be put in a position of such authority. One might ask that, if one knows nothing about the psychology of cops. But SABU knows that all cops are narcissist bastards, so it’s only natural that one would deny the obvious. More telling even is the readiness with which his fellow cops rationalize his lapses as some kind of scheme to go undercover or something. Outsiders — an arrested junkie, the parents of the kidnapped child (or more specifically, their bilingual housekeeper) — see what the supposed professionals cannot: this cop is clearly nuts. But crazy or sane, it doesn’t really matter: he gets the job done.
To’s Vengeance is about a killer out to avenge his murdered daughter while suffering from worsening dementia to the point that he forgets why he was killing in the first place, but just keeps doing it anyway, violence becoming its own motivation, with the rationale only a superfluous excuse for all the death. Arrested Memory finds the cop’s rationality, that hallmark of quirky detective heroes from Sherlock Holmes to Columbo to Monk, entirely irrelevant to their performance. Chance, as in Miike, as in To, is the real determinant of police success. Everything else is rationalization, usually calculated after the fact. SABU understands that they’re along for the ride just like the rest of us, no more or less in control, no matter what they think.
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