Hana Bi

Takeshi Kitano, who is virtually unknown in North America, is Japan’s biggest media personality. Since 1973 he has parlayed a career in standup comedy into seven current TV shows, half-a-dozen regular newspaper columns and 55 books. From 1990 to 1995 he was chosen “favorite TV celebrity” in a nationwide poll, and in 1994 picked (by the same people, presumably) as the man the electorate would most like to see as Prime Minister.

Not surprisingly, he has moved into movies as well. Starting in 1989 with Violent Cop—a film that makes Dirty Harry look like Frasier—he has gone on to direct (and for the most part, star in) seven films. Two of them get a wide North American release this month, thus making us privileged in a way Japanese cinemagoers were not: we get to start with his finest and most mature work.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Takeshi makes gangster movies. He also makes cop movies, and he makes movies where it’s sometimes hard to tell the virtues of one from the virtues of the other. They are films about the honourable life and a good death, and how for cop or yakuza one is usually a part of the other. In Fireworks he’s the cop—although by now such details are probably decided at the script stage by the flip of a coin.

He’s a cop for whom guilt seems the primary driving emotion as well. Yoshitaka Nishi is a man in the midst of losing everything that gives his life meaning: his daughter has just died; his wife is dying of cancer; one of his partners has been killed and another crippled in a bungled stakeout; his job in jeopardy and he’s in hock up to his eyeballs to the yakuza. Nishi’s reaction is novel: he decides to rob a bank so he and his wife can enjoy one last vacation together.

This kind of idea could make a really hideous American comedy-drama—in fact it probably already has—but here it emerges as a story of love and death told with simplicity, elegance, heart and—oddly—humour. This is a very funny movie, especially taking into account the genuine gravity of the proceedings just described. As a director, Takeshi seems to draw on his roots in standup comedy, although as an actor one takes his past as a comic on faith—his face is so impassively stony that you worry a smile might tear it in half. Yet his inscrutability is the key to his filmmaking.

Takeshi makes the simplest movies in the world, and his secret would be well learned by a lot of American filmmakers. What it consists of, quite simply, is the courage to do almost nothing; of having faith in the audience to read into the movie what you need them to. He often gets points across with static images of peoples faces; just turning the camera on and leaving it there for longer than you expect. There’s something very Japanese about this—holding a simple medium shot of an actor and pulling the audience in, instead of pushing the actor out at them with a close-up. A lot of Fireworks is the Triumph of the Impassive Reaction Shot.

What emerges from such a method is paradoxical: everything onscreen (even the quite graphic violence) is restrained and held in, and yet the finished product puts you through the emotional wringer—Fireworks is more moving than just about anything currently in front of a Canadian movie audience. Whether a North American director could get away with it is another matter. It would be nice of someone worked up the courage to try.

-Published in The Globe and Mail, 1998