Japanese cult director Seijun Suzuki's combination sequel to and remake of his 1967 gangster film classic Branded To Kill stars Makiko Esumi as Miyuki Minazuki, AKA "the Stray Cat," a beautiful female assassin. She is number three in the hierarchy of killers in her criminal organization at the beginning of the film, but soon a battle breaks out among the assassins, all of whom are trying to become the number one killer by murdering their competition. Miyuki finds herself fighting her fellow assassins one by one, encountering along the way such eccentrically-nicknamed opponents as The Teacher, who is confined to a wheelchair, Painless Surgeon, a bearded Westerner who literally feels no pain, and Dark Horse (Masatoshi Nagase), who wears a blond wig and has a perpetual case of the sniffles. Also making an appearance is Goro Hanada, the hero of Branded To Kill (played in the original by Jo Shishido, but here by Mikijiro Hira), who becomes a mentor to Miyuki, and is now known as number zero. The film's skeletal plot mostly allows director Suzuki to develop elaborate visual tableaus that stretch the possibilities of narrative cinema.

In the late 60's, Seijun Suzuki was fired by Nikkatsu Studios because his flamboyant stylistic experiments were rendering the B-movie Yakuza flicks he'd been hired to churn out unintelligible to audiences. In the 1990's, however, Suzuki was rediscovered by a new generation of enthusiasts, and his more audacious projects, like Tokyo Drifter and Branded To Kill, are now considered classics precisely because they transcend their humble beginnings as genre movies. Pistol Opera, made more than 30 years after Branded To Kill, finds the septuagenarian Suzuki freed from the constraints of budget and genre. It is the fullest flowering of his uniquely mind-boggling visual and narrative style. Its dreamlike narrative works on at least two levels of reality. The main story follows the gorgeous heroine Miyuki, who wears a black robe and high-heeled boots on the job, as she battles her fellow assassins in a series of ritualized and often hilarious duels. A second, much more dreamlike story line is made up of Miyuki's interactions with her boss, a mysterious veiled woman who hands out assassination assignments (and with whom she has a relationship that is both sexual and violent), and the elderly woman and adolescent girl who live in a traditional Japanese dwelling with them. Both story lines play out within hallucinatory visual compositions that are drenched in garish colors and conjure up abstract, otherworldly locales where the line between reality and dreams dissolves. Pistol Opera is a dazzling achievement by a completely original cinematic pioneer who is finally getting his due four decades after his career began.