Swallowtail Butterfly

In an alternate timeline/future, the yen is in high demand.  Immigrants flock to the city, which they call “Yentown”, trying to scrape together as much yen as they can.  The locals, disdainful of these folk, call them (confusingly) “Yentowns”.  One resident of Yentown is a young girl with no name (Ayumi Ito).  Her mother, a prostitute, has just died.  The girl ends up with a Chinese prostitute named Glico (pop star Chara), who takes the girl under her wing and names her “Ageha” (the Japanese word for swallowtail butterfly).  Ageha and Glico run with a motley group, including Glico’s boyfriend Fei-hong (Hiroshi Mikami) and an international collection of other small time hustlers.  One of Glico’s johns gets rough and falls out a window.  As the group goes to bury him, they find a Frank Sinatra cassette.  This tape will set up a chain of events involving gangsters, counterfeiting, long-lost relatives, a Yentown nightclub and rock stardom.

And that’s pretty much just the first half of this sprawling film.  Movies that drastically shift gears like this can be a wonder (Love Exposure comes to mind) or a trainwreck.  Swallowtail falls somewhere in between.  It combines social issues drama, a coming-of-age story, soap opera, the Yakuza flick, something like Repo Man meets Tarantino, and god knows what else.  It’s basically a completely different vibe every 10 or 15 minutes.  It makes an unusual experience, and what I’d have to say is Shunji Iwai’s weirdest film.

But no matter what genre or mood it’s dabbling in, the film also feels fraught with cliché.  It does a lot, but most of it isn’t done especially well.  From the labored metaphors to the terrible rock band that Glico assembles to the often strained dialogue, it tends to be underwhelming.  While the three leads are generally pretty good, the vast array of supporting performances range from passable to painful.  The film’s visual style is also sometimes irritating, with tiresome whip-pans and rapid edits.  To use some outdated terminology, it’s got an “MTV” sensibility.  However, this only happens sporadically and sometimes the cinematography is quite lovely.

With the film going all over the place like this, it’s hard to pin down what Iwai wants to say.  Is it a commentary on Japan’s attitudes toward foreigners (Glico has to pretend to be Japanese in order to make it big), or the economic situation?  Is it a more universal message about people living in the margins?  Maybe it’s all of the above, but with so much going on it’s hard for any of it to truly resonate.

It’s odd that a movie so original can also feel so hackneyed.  At times I was dying to see what would happen next, and other times I was just waiting for it to be over.  Too crazy to fit comfortably alongside Iwai’s quiet melodramas, and too tame to hold up in comparison to the likes of Sono, Miike or Survive Style 5+.  I liked it… and yet I didn’t.  If nothing else, though, it was unexpected.  Rating: Good (70)

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