"His whole being exudes despair," yawns the femme fatale in Masahiro Shinoda's moody yakuza noir Pale Flower, referring to a shadowy young assassin lurking quietly in the corner of the room. Though his presence is as foreboding to her as the Grim Reaper, the line suggests a strange camaraderie between hunter and hunted, because they both understand the way the world works. Extending the postwar nihilism of its American B-movie counterparts, the 1964 film also exudes despair. It drips from every corner of Pale Flower's Cinemascope frame, snaking through a seedy underworld where honor has been overcome by addiction, violence, and crippling ennui. Into this world comes brooding antihero Ryo Ikebe, a parolee so inured by his prison stay that he looks at the human race with the detachment of a zoologist, wondering why he was put away for killing one of these "stupid animals." The convoluted plot sends him on a dangerous tour through gangland, which has re-formed into tenuous new rivalries and allegiances while he's been away, leaving his own role a bit confused. But Shinoda (Double Suicide) doesn't care to sort these things out for Ikebe or the audience: Instead, he obsessively maps the narrow parameters of Ikebe's daily existence, from yakuza haunts and horse tracks during the day to high-stakes gambling houses at night. Elegantly photographed in black-and-white, Pale Flower trades action for vivid atmospherics, soaking in the numbing routines that swamp its hero in loneliness and boredom. After being sprung from prison, Ikebe returns to his old duties without much vigor, but he gets a surprising charge after laying eyes on the mysterious Mariko Kaga, a beautiful young woman who throws piles of cash around in gambling halls with reckless abandon. Using his connection to the underworld, Ikebe seduces Kaga with the promise of escorting her to big-money games around Tokyo, which also puts them in touch with some unsavory characters. Their compelling, oddly sexless relationship forms around the common philosophy that life is empty and can only be temporarily salvaged by the passing thrills of drag racing, high rolling, and death. Conscious of noir tradition, Shinoda plays off the standard archetypes of a stone-faced, seen-it-all hero and the adventuresome femme fatale who shakes him from an existential stupor. For a while, Ikebe feels alive in ways he hasn't experienced since he stabbed a man to death, but in a magnificently stylized dream sequence, his anxieties about Kaga's free-spirited nature finally overwhelm him. In a DVD-feature interview, Shinoda talks about the film as a sweeping allegory for the Cold War situation, in which Japan (represented by "lone wolf" Ikebe) didn't have a place in the conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Though it's unlikely that anyone will leave Pale Flower with the same reading, the film's sense of displacement and solitude in a changed world remains palpable.