Building the New Queer Canon is a monthly column exploring a new or rediscovered LGBTQIA+ film, and whether it deserves inclusion in an ever-growing “canon” of queer cinema. VV’s Bye Bye Love essay contains spoilers. Isao Fujisawa’s 1974 film features Ren Tamura, Miyabi Ichijô and Enver Tenpai. Check out more movie coverage in the film essays section.

Jean-Luc Godard is the cinematic figure held most responsible for claiming that all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun (although the French New Wave filmmaker attributed the quote to D.W Griffith). His earliest works thrived on this economy of narrative, allowing him to experiment with the formal conventions of cinematic storytelling. Although the French New Wave is as varied in style and quality as any major film movement, it’s this approach that is most synonymous with it in the broad public imagination. Just look at the ways Godard and company influenced American filmmaking. The New Hollywood era informally began with the bloody miserabilism of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), perhaps the definitive “girl and a gun” movie of its generation. And in the East, the Japanese New Wave reached a high watermark with Seijun Suzuki’s Branded To Kill (1967), which joyously subverts cliches of both American and Japanese crime films. 

Branded to Kill was infamously a critical and commercial flop upon release, making Suzuki a pariah in the film industry overnight, with salvation coming only in the form of a lawsuit to the Nikkatsu Corporation after they unceremoniously removed the filmmaker from their payroll. This became headline news, transforming Suzuki into a counter-cultural hero, with his anarchic spin on Yakuza dramas becoming a blockbuster in its second life. To understand Isao Fujisawa’s recently rediscovered 1974 effort Bye Bye Love — a movie which takes the French New Wave influence back to its purest, most Breathless (1960) form — it’s essential to take in this cultural context. Even though the film is the rare independent Japanese production of its era, its gleeful pastiche of crime film tropes — particularly western crime film tropes — likely didn’t appear as groundbreaking at the time of its release, due to the debt Bye Bye Love clearly paid Suzuki. The second wind of success for Branded to Kill made the cine-literate genre satire more palpable, and also made it easier to grasp for those who deemed it “confusing” on initial release, so that even audiences outside of film schools and hipster circles could begin to grasp the ways the film takes a sledgehammer to the stereotypical crime movie formula.

Bye Bye Love Essay: Related — Catching Fire: The Inscrutable Mayhem of Seijun Suzuki’s ‘Branded to Kill’

Without the certainty of a wide release, due to the nature of Bye Bye Love’s production and lack of star power, it’s unsurprising that Fujisawa’s film languished in obscurity until being revived for anniversary screenings on the festival circuit in 2024. After all, this is a movie which yearns for the countercultural cool of Bonnie and Clyde or Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973), even as it aims to rip apart the rule book on how such “lovers on the lam” stories are told. Lead character Utamaro (Ren Tamura) is a distinctly unlikable figure, even as an antihero, whose only noble gesture throughout the movie occurs shortly after meeting the person he comes to nickname Giko (Miyabi Ichijô), when he agrees to stop a man who has been following her. This begins a Rube Goldberg-like process that lands Utamaro in the possession of a cop’s gun as he bonds with Giko in the hope of consummating what he perceives to be a budding relationship, despite their protestations that they have a partner.

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Tamura’s character perceives Giko to be a woman, but they define themselves as something more fluid, ultimately using both male and female pronouns throughout Bye Bye Love. Utamaro begins to question his own sexuality in response to his continued attraction, pondering over whether he would be willing to go “gay” to be with them. That the main character is a destructive, often vile figure gives the film some leeway when it comes to analyzing gender norms; Giko is given agency, ensuring they aren’t defined by the way Utamaro views them, even if it is something of a misstep to have their character name be the one he coined. 

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Any review will tell you that Bye Bye Love followed Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) — another recently rediscovered work which quickly became considered one of the canonical trans films — by dissecting gender norms as much as genre conventions within Japanese cinema, but whereas that movie aimed for transgression when exploring matters of sexuality, Isao tackles the subject with a deeper sincerity. A fourth wall-breaking sex scene appears to be a formal descendant to Matsumoto’s hybrid of documentary and erotic thriller, the genderqueer protagonist initially speaking to the camera like they’re being interviewed about trivial matters such as favorite foods, juxtaposed with artfully staged sequences as they undress. What makes this a truly telling moment, however, is how a dueling voiceover arises from Utamaro, describing his confusion at the person in front of him, even as they’re bearing their soul about the most trivial of matters. It’s as sensual a sequence as could possibly be conceived about the fundamental disconnect in a relationship.

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The other sex scenes in Bye Bye Love are more noticeably high concept in their construction but are fascinating precisely because of what they don’t allude to, embracing Giko’s fluidity by framing them in ways that don’t depict the genitals that are central to the male protagonist’s fascination. In a modern context, this might seem prudish, but it feels revelatory for the era, ensuring audiences view the character as a genuine sex symbol and not a mere fetish object. That the sex scenes themselves are built around hyper-specific fetishes, the latter a threesome with the trio giving each other BDSM-adjacent electric shocks, makes the approach even more surprising — they’re the only moments which don’t follow genre formulas in terms of storytelling, as gender is shown not to matter at all. Trans and gender non-conforming stories were still a rarity at this time, but even seen now, in a time of comparatively rich onscreen representation, this is a conclusion seldom arrived at.

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Bye Bye Love provides an effortless cool which it feels too desperate to achieve elsewhere. Consider a subplot involving the killing of Giko’s American lover “Nixon” (Enver Tenpai), which is not-too-subtly designed as an allegory for Japanese independence from the dominant hands of the United States. Moments like this suggest a film which likely felt, within its moment, as if it were trying too hard to be a grand statement on a disaffected generation, not measuring up to the satirical, slyly genre-defying cool of Suzuki’s work. Bye Bye Love’s shortcomings would be further underlined by the arrival of a more conventional Hollywood effort, Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1974) — another crime film which raised a middle finger towards the conventions of polite society.

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Bye Bye Love may predate Dog Day Afternoon, but as crime stories that center relationships between a cis man and a partner who doesn’t conform to gender norms, their contrasts are fascinating, even if both films are out-of-step with the era’s social conservatism. Fujisawa works with a genre renowned for its fatalism, where any lovers on the run story will likely be compared to Bonnie and Clyde, which infamously ends with its central couple brutally gunned down. In Bye Bye Love, Utamaro’s gradual understanding of Giko, and rationalization of his own sexuality in relation to them, is ultimately overshadowed by the knowledge that this genre requires at least one of the pair to be killed before the credits roll. Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, however, is uncharacteristically earnest for a Hollywood production of its era in relation to gender and sexuality, refusing to vilify Sonny’s (Al Pacino) reasons for committing a robbery, let alone an attempt to make him the butt of a joke for wanting to raise money for a partner’s reassignment surgery.

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Dog Day Afternoon’s Sonny is every bit as unstable as Utamaro but acts for a purpose far more noble than sexual desire — and when working within a genre as well-worn as either a heist thriller or a lovers-on-the-lam tale, it’s that deeper motivation which can help it resonate further. Bye Bye Love is very enjoyable, but its central story is neither as involving or as subversive as it perceives itself to be when leaving the frankness of its bedroom scenes behind. It’s a work I’m glad has been rescued from the archives, but it will likely resonate most in academic circles as a pretext for how queer themes would later be explored with greater richness in Japanese cinema.

Bye Bye Love is currently screening as part of the series “Bye Bye Love: Fujisawa Isao and the Japanese New Wave” at Metrograph in New York City.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

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