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Rating: This is not a normal review that I propose, but rather a broader reflection on an artist I greatly admire, namely Takeshi Kitano. And, in particular, on his relationship with the modern world.
Contains various spoilers for those who have not seen the following works or are not familiar with Kitano's work in general.
The following films mentioned are those I consider most significant within this discussion and represent the core of the great Japanese author's work in general: A Scene at the Sea, Sonatine, Hana-bi, Kikujiro's Summer, and Dolls. Works that strongly convey a sense of discomfort, melancholy, and unease regarding modernity.
Kitano, who, not coincidentally, has sometimes been spiritually compared to Mishima, one of the greatest anti-modern personalities of the twentieth century. Linked also, trivially, by the final reflection on death, as well as by the final act. The one Mishima performs on himself, staging his own mortuary play with the dramatic Seppuku within the Self-Defense Forces office, in one last, desperate yet futile revolt against the drift of progress and the end of the founding values of Japanese Tradition. The one Kitano represents through his protagonists, using guns rather than swords.
The spirit of the Samurai, after all, is taken up and inherited by the Yakuza. But not anymore, today.
"Human life is short, but I want to live forever." Yukio Mishima.
"It is easy to ignore the presence of death in our lives and try to live as if it doesn't exist. Death is something that follows you every moment. For me, it would be unnatural to think of life and death as two different elements. I think I am always constantly ready for its arrival, without, of course, being attracted or, even worse, obsessed with the matter. Rather, I believe that those who are obsessed with death consequently have the same attitude towards life." Takeshi Kitano.
What unites these two giants of the Rising Sun is this drive for life and death as two parts of the same entity.
Kitano’s cinema is one of primal and eternal elements. The sea, the beach, the island, play, wandering, love.
In A Scene at the Sea, the two protagonists are a deaf-mute couple, and the film shows their love story also linked to his passion for surfing, which ultimately will be fatal to him, thus immediately giving a complete form to the Kitanian circle of love and death, anticipating what will happen in Dolls a decade later, with three interwoven stories in a universal deterministic circle.
In Sonatine, the betrayed Yakuza temporarily take refuge on the island of Okinawa, waiting to know their fate; and they spend their days in a condition totally suspended in time and space, playing among themselves, until the blood will brutally end this idyll of return to the golden age of childhood, far from the contemporary, metropolitan, gloomy and violent world.
In Hana-bi, the refusal, often violent if not brutal, of the modern world is represented by the juxtaposition of sadness, pain, and heart-wrenching poetry, in the story of two spouses who, again, seek a final refuge, of play and intimacy, but encounter, at times, the rudeness of a vacationer before the final showdown.
Once again on a beach, facing the sea. A double shot will end both lives, marked by illness and remorse, but also by melancholy, tenderness and a great silence in the face of contemporary life and urban chaos.
In Dolls, the long wandering of the two vagabonds (who, in some scenes, wear traditional clothes) tied by a red cord, who traverse places and seasons, in a condition totally stripped of the futile necessities of modernity, bound only by themselves, awaiting a common epilogue; the return of an old love tied to a past betrayed and sacrificed in favor of a more comfortable condition due to career (always in crime) and material success; the platonic and boundless love of a fan for a singer. But above all, a cosmic destiny of sadness and death, the bitter reflection on the impossibility of free will (through the allegory, dear also to Mizoguchi, of the puppets) as well as the achievement of happiness and love within an era that swallows everything, leaving only behind a painfully, piercing beauty ("It’s the beauty that hurts you most") of colors, dawn and twilight, in an eternal cyclic repetition of the same mistakes. The symbol of the circle, in fact, is present in Sonatine and Dolls, and it is significant.
Again the journey and play, central still in Kikujiro, Kitano’s lightest film, with two protagonists both excluded and solitary, a yakuza and a child, who end up sharing a summer together in the hope of finding the child's mother; this journey will bring bitterness but also infinite sweetness in the relationship between these two little outcasts.
Kitano's is a cinema of escape and shelter, but it can only be temporary because the accounts must eventually be settled. And the defeat is already marked from the start.
In general, every character of Kitano is alien to their own modernity; they find themselves, as I initially mentioned, uneasy, in struggle or in battle, in society or, in any case, in each respective world, such as in the context of the modern Yakuza (the impressive Outrage trilogy marks the definitive point of Kitano’s reflection on the Japanese organization), now more in the form of a multinational, stripped of all ancient values, or organized crime as a global and globalized phenomenon (see Aniki's path in Brother). The common fate of all Kitano’s antiheroes is, as previously stated. A surrender to the modern world, through self-inflicted death, the final sacrifice, the last escape from an era to which they no longer belonged. But in reality, they never belonged to it.
And it is worth emphasizing again how the word in Kitano's cinema is totally superfluous within his most successful and meaningful works. There are things you can't convey with the use of the verb, which, in fact, would tarnish the purity of a moment. In a world where information, individuals, and words accumulate, becoming redundant and absolutely unbearable noise, silence is the true revolution and rebellion.
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