MovieChat Forums > Shinjuku kuroshakai: Chaina mafia sensô (1995) Discussion > The twist?

The twist?

posted 19 years ago by cjrushbrook
4 replies | jump to latest

Hi all,

I watched this a couple of nights ago and thought it was pretty good, but got a bit confused by the last line of dialogue - didn't understand what it meant, but thought 'ah well, never mind'. But then in one of the reviews here someone descibes the film as having a big twist at the end, which I can only imagine relates to this line, so can anyone enlighten me?

*******POSSIBLE SPOILER*******

The line of dialogue I mean is a voice over from the Taiwanese Yakuza's lover who starts the film with a voice over saying that he needs to tell us what true love is. At the very end of the film we hear his voice over again saying something along the lines of 'I must tell you, Longren, that I am Kiriya's lover'. Kiriya is the lead cop, and I must confess I can't remember whon Longren is. So can anyone help me understand this one?

[–] 19 years ago

[deleted]

[–] muddy-mudskipper 19 years ago

Longren is Kiriya's original Chinese name - the one he seems to have used at a time spent in his youth in China. He adopts the name Kiriya when he arrives back in Japan at the age of sixteen. We learn this from the officer in Taipei during their visit to the hospital.

************** SPOILER *************************

The last few lines are:
'Longren, Please forgive me.'
'I need to tell you about him, Kiriya Tatsuhito.'
'He was my lover.'

Make of that what you will. It might mean that the boy had been Kiraya's lover before Wang's - but Kiriya does not seem to know who the boy is after chasing him in the club at the beginning - he asks the young lady he takes in for questioning who the boy is. It's interesting that he uses the name Kiraya used up to the age of sixteen - where would he have known that from?

[–] regresus 19 years ago

I saw the movie about a week ago using subtitles from the web. I actually found two different subtitle tracks for the movie, and they have different endings. One is talking about how Kiriya is killed in Shinjuku and the other about him being the lover of the young boy.

Could some one please clarify which one of the translations that is the correct one.

Philip Gerlee
Gothenburg
Sweden

[–] regresus 19 years ago

I found the following post on Niche Flix Forums. It explains the confusion regarding the "twist":

I rented this last week & after watching it I was very confused. So I looked at Tom Mes's book Agitator, http://www.midnighteye.com/features/agitator.shtml. This only confused me more because the ending he describes was completely different from the ending on the DVD. Huh?

So I wrote Tom. Looks like the Tartan DVD carred by NicheFlix has some serious translation problems, leading to an ending that is almost the exact opposite of the original Japanese.

Looks like R1 releases of Miike's Triad Trilogy (Shinjuku, Rainy Dogs, Ley Lines) are coming later this year. Maybe they'll be well translated.

Below is Tom's explanation. You may not want to read this unless you've seen the movie.

The answer to this problem is quite simple: the translation of the final voice over on the Tartan disc is wrong. The subtitles on Tartan's version, as you noticed, say "He was my lover", but the voice over says "Tatsuhito was later killed in an alley". I have no idea what might have caused this error, but it's not the only subtitle problem on Tartan's Miike discs. Their disc of the otherwise superb film Ley Lines leaves entire scenes untranslated because they are in a Chinese dialect.

--
Ian
http://www.duallens.com
http://shawbros.typepad.com/shaw/

Philip Gerlee
Gothenburg
Sweden