Review: Young Yakuza

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There are more than enough fine documentaries filtering in the world to program two dozen, three dozen twenty-four-hour movie channels, but there’s not enough time in the world to witness everything that’s been witnessed out in the world, sad to say. I’m saying that not only as a reviewer of the many fine (and not so fine) nonfiction features that make it into theatrical distribution in Chicago, but as someone who goes to documentary festivals and listens and learns and watches and reels at all hours: nonfiction filmmaking is a tsunami of information being constructed in idiosyncratic fashion… while American television, which could finance and further such work, is largely uninterested. (HBO and Cinemax, for example, do yeoman’s duty with the form.) Here’s a doc playing for a week at Facets, “Young Yakuza,” by the French director Jean-Pierre Limosin. Naoki, a 20-year-old juvenile delinquent, is offered an unusual way out of his troubles: his mother takes the advice of a friend and hands him over to the yakuza, the Japanese mafia, for a year. Through other circumstances, Limosin had met a yakuza boss in Paris and was surprised by an offer to view gangland from the inside, particularly considering the violence that had been visited upon other filmmakers attempting to cover their turf. With Naoki as his central figure, and an agreement with the boss about what would be filmed, the process began. More than a curio, it’s a tasty series of anecdotes and experiences about a much-mythologized way of life. Here today, gone in a week: so many stories to be told. 98m. 35mm. (Ray Pride)