Pale Flower opens as the gangster Muraki (Ryo Ikebe) emerges from jail after serving time for an assigned murder. He finds that in his absence his gang has made peace with its former rival. Using the immediate postwar period--when Japan prepared to enter into economic competition with the West--as a setting, Shinoda examines the effect of change on Japanese culture and society. He updates the traditional yakuza genre: in a world organized around established roles and obligations, a "mood of uneasiness" prevails. Shinoda creates the "mood" with a striking visual style in which sudden movement and stasis, individual and group portrait alternate as the camera seeks out expressions and gestures, and then steps back to survey underworld locales. The uneasiness is centered on Muraki and Saeko (Mariko Kaga), the enigmatic woman to whom he is drawn, and who seeks an elusive pleasure in gambling while he seeks his in killing. For them, death, risk and desire are inseparable and fatalistally pursued for personal aesthetic reasons, detached from any traditional (anti-)social context. This "paling" of traditional roles, while retaining their historical forms, is expressed in Shinoda's use of the hanafuda (flower) gambling cards as a motif. "My subject," Shinoda said, "is a man in traditional yakuza society who finds himself hopelessly out of place in the modern social structure, and learns something about himself through this discovery."-- Kathy Geritz