ZIGEUNERWEISEN (1980), dir. Seijun Suzuki

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“Dreamlike” may be the most apt description for Seijun Suzuki’s “Zigeunerweisen,” which doesn’t necessarily rely on logic in exploring the depths of its main characters’ feelings. Both a melodrama and something of a ghost story, it doesn’t have much in the way of conventional narrative thrust; rather, the screenplay seems to feel its way around, guided by the emotional states of the intellectual and middle-class set it depicts.

The first part of Suzuki’s famous “Taisho Trilogy,” the film takes place in a 1920’s Japan where the privileged live comfortably, but perhaps not happily or virtuously. Initially set at a seaside vacation resort, the protagonists include Aochi (Toshiya Fujita), a college professor of German, whose manners and traditional bearing make him the polar opposite of Nagasako (Yoshio Harada), his long-haired and wild-eyed friend. Despite his striking good looks, Nagasako is a hedonist, misogynist, and maybe something worse: when we first meet him, he is being accused of a woman’s murder. Although he claims his innocence to the police, he eventually makes a drunken confession to a local geisha named Koine (Naoko Otani). Aochi, meanwhile, remains friends with Nagasako despite the possibility he is a serial killer.

Photographed in a manner that starts out bereft of sunlight and only gets darker, “Zigeunerweisen” isn’t concerned with crime and punishment so much as the emotionally-charged triangles formed between various characters: Nagasako, Koine, and Aochi; and later, either the two men and Aochi’s wife (Michiyo Ookusu) or a Koine lookalike named Sono. Recurring appearances by a trio of blind, vulgar beggars (who look and act like something out of either a slapstick comedy or zombie flick) provide yet another three-sided relationship, but the film is less an essay than a jangled-feeling procession of images that aren’t necessarily consistent from cut to cut, as well as somnambulant portions comparable to the best of David Lynch.

Some of the film’s more gloriously-deranged moments come with no warning and go without any explanation, but in keeping with Suzuki’s reputation as an instinctive filmmaker, and the context of the protagonists being ambushed by their own feelings and inhibitions, they feel right. A nightmarish sequence where Aochi’s wife tries to escape from Nagasako in her house, only to find him behind every door, reappearing in improbable locations, is one of the best. In another scene, the lights in Koine’s home go out when she and Aochi are alone, replaced by floating mirrors and a single, glowing red lantern. “I feel like I’ve fallen into the fox’s den,” Aochi says. “Am I the fox?” the hostess responds.

Koine later says about the beggars, “They were married to each other. It was the only way they could survive.” The same thing, it turns out, could be said about most of the film’s threesomes. Aochi going home to his woman leaves the rest of female-kind at the mercy of cruel Nagasako, apparently. Likewise, when one character’s wanderlust kicks in, all that’s left for his partners to share is bitterness, isolation, and discomfort. Suzuki and screenwriter Yozo Tanaka stage this pattern for just about every triangular permutation, but it’s setting events in a time period with so much preoccupation over self-pleasure that helps ground the potent, phantasmagorical imagery. Here, the objects of desire tend to become desired objects: Aochi imagines Koine as the kind of mythical creature that could be found in the very books he pores over; meanwhile, the man his foodie wife is infatuated with becomes a thing to be devoured and be devoured by.

As for sex animal Nagasako, he seemingly desires to feast on death itself, visualizing a blood-covered crab crawling out of one of his possible murder victim’s genitals, and commenting afterward, “I fancy a dish of eel.” Indeed, Nagasako looks like a man about to rip the next woman open with his teeth before sucking the marrow out, and this objectification with death eventually extends to Nagasako, whose bones he asks for upon his expiration. Will Aochi be able to extricate himself from this decorum-defying pact with a deranged man, or is a bargain a bargain? Known for what some scholars cited as a “sick sense of humor,” Suzuki offers the ultimate comeuppance for a world in which no one believes in anything: proof that something beyond these shores exists, but that it’s equally obsessed with its own enjoyment. That’s what I got out of it, at least.

Overall rating: **** (out of ****)