Framed as an extended flashback from the police interrogation room where the central character is on the receiving end of a ‘hard cop/soft cop’ routine and copiously narrated in voice-overs, this is the one Mochizuki film in which a guy succeeds in extricating himself from the criminal underworld. Asakawa (played by the lanky, long-haired Matsuoka, also seen in A Yakuza in Love and in other films such as last year’s Gonin 2) is an aspiring con-artist who eventually learns the lesson that treating everyone else as suckers is a fool’s game. On the way to this conclusion, he manages to ruin several other lives, notably that of a cottage industrialist whom he bleeds dry financially, robs of his sexy stepdaughter and finnaly drives to suicide by using him as a scapegoat for his own financial chicanery.Mobster’s Confessions sees Mochizuki edging away from the orthodoxies of the Yakuza genre and into the territory that Godard mapped out in Bande à part. It’s about small-time Yakuza with delusions of class. The film is also vaguely Godardian in its eccentric mixture of comedy, drama and tortured sex, not to mention its obsessive concern with money. The eagle-eyed might spot Mochizuki himself as a convict on his way to jail. (Tony Rayns)
