“Smashing the 0-Line” Japanese Theatrical Poster
AKA: Secret Zero Zone
Director: Seijun Suzuki
Cast: Hiroyuki Nagato, Yuji Kodaka,Sanae Nakahara, Mayumi Shimizu, Tomo’o Nagai, Kaku Takashina, Emiko Azuma, Shoichi Ozawa, Ryohei Uchida, Keisuke Noro
Running Time: 83 min.
By Kelly Warner
One of my favorite film heroes is the investigative journalist. Seekers of truth armed only with pen and notepad, overturning stones to reveal the misdeeds of powerful men who thought justice couldn’t touch them. Films about the journalist righting wrongs like Spotlight or All the President’s Men are worthwhile reminders of the importance of a free press in a functioning society. But films about journalists behaving badly are often just as entertaining and important. Ace in the Hole is a classic, Shattered Glass showed the world that Hayden Christensen could act, and Network, Nightcrawler, and South Korea’s underrated thriller The Exclusive: Beat the Devil’s Tattoo are all solid examples of the journalist or media company that is so desperate for a story that they either conjure one up out of the blue or twist the facts in order to reach a larger audience. Seijun Suzuki’s Smashing the 0-Line is another such film, focusing on two reporters, one who goes by the book and one who makes the news happen for him.
The two competing leads are played by Yuji Kodaka (Tattooed Life) and Hiroyuki Nagato (Shinjuku Incident). They’re friendly rival reporters from two different Tokyo papers. An early scene has them talking about going to a baseball game together and that’s pretty much the last time we ever get to see them enjoying each other’s company. Yuji Kodaka’s Nishina begins to worry about the unseemly practices of Nagato’s roguish Katori. Though Katori’s paper is proud of all the breaking news crime beat reporting that Katori digs up for them, they’re apparently unaware of how he helps to engineer the busts which he covers. In one of Katori’s first scenes, we see him leaving a woman in bed after some afternoon sex, only to open the door for the police so that they may arrest her for drug trafficking. Not long after that, Katori leads the cops to a raid on a boat which appears to be an Opium den. It doesn’t seem to matter to Katori that the woman might’ve loved him or that the boat was operated by a former classmate, things that Nishina tries to point out to him. Katori replies, “You’d protect a drug dealer just because he was a classmate of ours?” And though that morally gray question leaves Nishina momentarily stumped for a reply, Katori’s increasingly risky attempts to get the big story soon lead them further and further apart.
Katori bites off more than he can chew when he tries to use his tactics to flush out the leader of a drug running business. The drug business, which is linked to Hong Kong, starts going after Katori in response. They abduct his sister (The Wind-of-Youth Group’s Mayumi Shimizu) and threaten to rape her if he doesn’t comply. And then… he doesn’t. They’re just about ready to do their worst to the girl when Nishina and the police arrive at the last moment. Katori, now driven by rage (but no less an asshole), makes it his mission to expose the drug traffickers, even as his own paper begins to second guess keeping him under their employ.
It’s at this point that the film loses its momentum. When it’s a drama about Nishina vs. Katori, I was there for it. But then Katori goes missing in his pursuit of the truth and Nishina has to go undercover in the shipping lanes in order to find his ‘friend’ and I gradually started to lose interest. I’m not 100% sure why that is, other than I think it’s clear that the film works best when Katori is on screen, and when he goes missing the film loses something.
Hiroyuki Nagato, who plays the fundamentally flawed Katori, played a reporter much like Nishina in Seijun Suzuki’s The Sleeping Beast Within. Released just a few months apart, The Sleeping Beast Within and Smashing the 0-Line are strikingly similar films, both focusing on journalist heroes who take on the illegal drug trade. The Sleeping Beast Within was more interesting to me, as it took dark crime elements and dropped them on normal, unsuspecting people. Smashing the 0-Line’s protagonists are journalists, most of them working the crime beat, and as such it lacks the same punch when the villains focus their ire on the innocent. And where Sleeping Beast Within kept ratcheting up the tension until the final moment, Smashing the 0-Line doesn’t manage to do much with its final act. It’s like they ran out of twists or surprising character growth.
Filmed with the look of a docudrama, Smashing the 0-Line isn’t among the most stylish of Suzuki’s films. It’s reminiscent at times of a Kinji Fukasaku crime picture, complete with freeze frames and onscreen text reading criminal indictments. It’s interesting to watch the director play with such similar material as his previous film and make such a radically different movie. What’s most impressive is to see how good Nagato is here compared to the decent but kinda dull work he delivered in The Sleeping Beast Within. It’s a great performance. Yuji Kodaka is fine; he has more screen time than Nagato but the script and the audience understands it’s not his movie.
Smashing the 0-Line feels a bit like a stepping off point as Nikkatsu and director Suzuki transitioned away from mainstream genre fare of the 50s and moved towards the ‘borderless action’ style of the 60s. Though the film is not much of an action movie, it does have the grimy, liquored up, and unsparing qualities that the ‘borderless action’ movies were known for. Also worth noting how the film makes use of immigrants and westerners in its plot. The Chinese are Katori’s favorite criminal informants, Hong Kong is the source of many of the drugs, and American military deserters are some of the drug trade’s most loyal customers. At this point, Japan was beginning to turn the corner from the post-war cleanup but Smashing the 0-Line’s vision of the country seems more pessimistic and grim. It is full of background characters struggling with addiction and/or poverty. The moments I will likely remember most from Smashing the 0-Line are the slums and Katori’s eagerness to exploit their suffering for a cover story. It’s just a shame that, like the main character, the second half of the film loses its way.
Kelly Warner’s Rating: 6/10
