Shockingly gruesome violence and moments of genuine love and
tenderness make oddly comfortable bedfellows in this brutal yet touching film
from Japan’s Takeshi Kitano (or “Beat Takeshi”). The film follows an ex-cop
called Nishi, played by Kitano himself, who is no longer on the force due to an
incident resulting in the deaths of his co-workers. The film takes a while to
arrive at these plot points, however, and marks itself out principally as a
terse examination of this character. Take the first scene, where he makes two
louts clean his car. When one of them falters, he kicks him to the ground. As
with a lot of the characters Kitano plays in his other films, violence is
something that comes naturally, too naturally. He’s a more unpredictable
variant of the Clint Eastwood “Man With No Name” type.
Yet somewhere, buried deep, he has a heart. We learn that
his wife is seriously ill, dying, and through his interactions with her we see
that he is a man capable of warmth, love, good humour. One very crucial scene
has him robbing a bank to pay for them to take a trip away together, and where
another, perhaps lesser film, would have dwelled on the excitement of the
heist, Kitano plays the scene off cooly, showing only the elements we need to
know. He walks in dressed as a police office. He points the gun at the bank
clerk. She understands what to do, hands him the money, and then Nishi leaves.
This stripped back style, which amounts to a tranquillity,
pervades the film from beginning to end. The film occasionally comes across as
using montage. Take the notorious scene early on where Nishi stabs a man in the
eye with a pair of chopsticks. It is a brutal scene, yet it is played in such a
manner where we see no actual violence. Nishi picks up the chopsticks, and
gestures. We hear a scream. Blood falls onto the table in front. The man,
chopsticks in his eyes, falls to the floor. But we never see the chopsticks go
into the eyes, and the scene is effective primarily with the power of
suggestion. It proves Eisenstein’s theory of montage, that the human mind will
make connections between random images.
That’s not to say that there isn’t other, more graphic
violence in the film. This is one of those films where when people are shot,
they die, and we watch them die. It calls upon the viewer to reflect on the
senseless nature of killing. It approaches violence in a manner I found
agreeable, not exploitative but instead contemplative, befitting perhaps a Michael
Haneke film. It also has a good line in guilt, as we scrutinise Kitano’s
expressionless face and find, deep down, a sadness.
Yet for a film concerning itself with much killing, death
and anger, what struck me as most moving were the moments of tenderness Kitano
peppers his film with. The relationship between Nishi and his wife Miyuki,
played by Kayoko Kishimoto, struck me and actually takes up a majority of the
second half of the film. I came to admire how Kitano observes Nishi’s capabilities
for tenderness. There’s a scene where the pair are playing a guessing game with
playing cards. Miyuki is holding the cards up, and time after time Nishi is
guessing them correctly. Nishi can see them reflected in the mirror behind
Miyuki. It’s a beautifully played scene with a sublime little payoff, and it
adds brilliantly to the curious tone Kitano is going for. There is also a scene
where Miyuki is putting dead flowers in a jar of water, and a man observes that
she must be mad to do so. Nishi beats him half to death as a result. The scene,
whilst brutal, I nevertheless found moving because of Nishi’s fierce commitment
to his wife.
There’s also a subplot involving Nishi’s ex-partner Horibe,
played by Ren Ohsugi. Paralysed from the waist down and abandoned by his wife and
children, he is despondent and hopeless, suicidal. Nishi gets him some art
materials, and a fair portion of the film is devoted to observed his efforts at
artwork. It might seem superfluous, but I liked how it brought into focus the
twin peaks of his film, brutality and beauty.
It may not please all people. I came to appreciate the
juxtaposition of violence and loveliness, because the two seemed to accentuate
each other, but some may find them ill-fitting. The film has a non-linear construction
which some viewers may find odd or off-putting, and admittedly the film does
take a while to settle into what it’s actually doing. But I found it, above
all, to be a poetic and sublime film with a purity to the camerawork and a refreshingly
pared back approach to the emotions, which run deep. It’s the antithesis of
gangster movies which measure their emotions purely in body-counts and it makes
me very eager to see more of Kitano’s work. As a study of guilt, hurt, male
rage and love, you won’t see many better examples than this one.
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