Screens: Yakuza Princess is

of the project and sent it to Reynolds along with a decent-quality digital audio recorder.

Reynolds listened to the piece of music—“just some great Michael shit,” he says— and played a guitar part as an accompaniment. He didn’t love his first pass.

“The first time, I was not locked in,” Reynolds says. “On the second take, I realized I didn’t need to mess with the knobs. I just needed to play guitar...It was like, ‘just smoke a joint and get into it.’”

Reynolds was satisfied the second time around and sent the recording to Sokolowski. Back in Charlottesville, the pianist-cum- producer started putting the pieces together.

The first thing Sokolowski noticed? Instead of plugging directly into the recorder, Reynolds jacked into his own amp and used the recorder’s microphone to pick him up. “Had I known, I would have sent better mics,” Sokolowski laughs. “You could hear where he clicked the pedal. I was sort of nonplussed. But I got past that and just let it wash over me.”

The happy accident limited Sokolowski’s ability to chop the recording up and make distinct songs, so he built a 27-minute title track around the heart of Reynolds’ guitar playing. The only thing he changed about the original recording was to break the jam into three parts to make it vinyl-ready.

Sokolowski used other pieces of Reynolds’ performance to produce five more tracks. For the album’s balance, he reversed the creative process, reacting in his studio to the

MAGNOLIA PICTURES

Yakuza Princess stars Masumi and Jonathan Rhys Meyers as unlikely partners in a battle against the yakuza crime syndicate.

“It was like, ‘just smoke a joint and get into it.’”

TIM REYNOLDS

guitar parts. On penultimate track “Homunculus,” for example, Sokolowski uses a portion of Reynolds’ playing as a rhythm loop and lets another guitar piece trot over it as lead. It’s the most obvious example on the record of sound collaging, which Sokolowski says he did less of than expected, due to Reynolds’ own process.

“At the beginning, I thought I would just put some cool sounds down and he would send back super-clean guitar tracks,” Sokolowski says. “I realized he had the right idea anyway. It has shape and form and flow and melody and all of that stuff. He was hearing form in all of my sounds that I maybe only heard intuitively. I was putting it down—not in a haphazard state—but not in the way it would end up.”

And how does Soul Pilgrimage end up? On the surface, it sounds more in line with an electronic record than a strings-and-keys duo—more Groove Armada than Bill Evans and Jim Hall. But at its base, it’s guitar and piano playing, something Sokolowski wanted to highlight by avoiding emulated sounds throughout.

For Reynolds, the results couldn’t be more different from the type of guitar he plays on a nightly basis with DMB. This time, he’s filling the space between, you might say.

“When I’m playing with Dave, there is a different sense of space because the music has a different purpose,” Reynolds says. “But I love it. I’m a fan of ambient music. It has a lot of surprises, and it’s all wonderful.”

Plot plummet

Yakuza Princess plays to its weakness

By Deirdre Crimmins

arts@c-ville.com

Early on in Yakuza Princess, it becomes clear that crafting a story around generations of warring crime bosses, an amnesiac hitman, and a mourning granddaughter is a little too much for co-writer/director Vicente Amorim to juggle. There’s plenty of good here in the new film, but not enough awareness of what that good stuff is.

Based on the graphic novel Samurai Shiro by Brazilian author Danilo Beyruth, Yakuza Princess takes place mainly in São Paulo. The city has the largest Japanese diaspora in the world, and the setting serves the story well. The plot bobs and weaves its way through decades of yakuza factions in both Japan and Brazil, and focuses on its main character Akemi (Masumi).

Akemi’s grandfather, whom she’s lived with in São Paulo for nearly her entire life, has recently passed away. She clings to his memory and his personal effects, and seems unprepared and uninterested in moving forward without him. She continues to work, and train as a fighter with her sensei, but she’s just going through the motions. Grief hits her especially hard on her 21st birthday, when, instead of celebrating, she gets into a violent bar fight and flees.

As Akemi begins her emotional journey, a stranger (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) wakes up in a hospital in handcuffs with no memory—and a katana sword nearby. The bedside police chatter makes it clear that nobody knows who he is or why he has so many wounds on his face. He escapes from the hospital in hopes of figuring out his identity, where he got the sword, and why people want to kill him. He encounters Akemi, and they form a tentative partnership in an attempt to get to the bottom of a mysterious connection between them.

This is the setup for Yakuza Princess—and also where it goes off the mark. As the film gets into heftier plot points, its weaknesses become more glaring. Masumi executes the fight choreography beautifully, and does an excellent job portraying the stony, aloof Akemi, but problems arise when Akemi becomes emotionally vulnerable. Masumi’s wooden expressions and flat delivery don’t reflect her softening character.

The movie also buckles under the weight of its plot. The number of flashbacks and reminders of who is talking about whom, or which character died when, should have been a sign to the director and editor that there is just too much story here. We only ever get short character insights and histories because Yakuza Princess needs to keep its breakneck pace to squeeze in way too many players.

In trying to be too many things, Yakuza Princess never fully develops the emotional world of its characters, yet it expects the audience to care about their family history. The film excels in the realism of its on-screen

Yakuza Princess

R, 112 minutes

fights (gore hounds will delight in the visceral volume of blood throughout the movie), but it doesn’t lean in to being a martial arts film. It reveals the fantastical world of São Paulo’s Japanese section, but never immerses the audience in it. Sometimes movies suffer from a dearth of good ideas, but Yakuza Princess has the opposite problem: In trying to convey so many strengths, they are turned into weaknesses.