_Hana-bi_ / _Fireworks_. Written and directed by Takeshi Kitano. Cast in the order of credits: Takeshi Kitano credited as Beat Takeshi (Yoshitaka Nishi), Kayoko Kishimoto (Miyuki Nishi), Ren Osugi (Horibe), Susumu Terajima (Nakamura), Tetsu Watanabe (Tesuka), Hakuryu, Yasuei Yakushiji, Taro Istumi, Kenichi Yajima, Makoto Ashikawa, Yuko Daike. Cinematography by Hideo Yamamoto. Music by Joe Hisaishi. Paintings by Takeshi Kitano. Costume design by Masami Saito. Art direction by Norishiro Isoda. Film editing by Takeshi Kitano and Yoshinori Oota. 103 minutes.
Awarded the Golden Lion at the 1997 Venice Film Festival, the first Japanese film to be thus honored since Akira Kurosawa's _Rashomon_.
Selected web reviews: http://www.cinopsis.com/critics/hanabi.htm (French), http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Boulevard/2508/ci_hana.htm and http://luce.it/eventi/venezia/hana.htm (Italian), http://www.nytimes.com/library/film/032098firewor-film-review.html, http://magazines.enews.com/magazines/tnr/current/kauffmann040698.html, http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/CALWEEK/t000026743.1.html.
"Hana Bi", the Japanese word for fireworks, literally translates its two Kanji characters as "Flowers (of) Fire", the twin elements that represent a familiar contraposition of evanescent life with violent death. For me, the worst thing about the present version is that it makes Quentin Tarantino look like a gutless loser that he is. And I only saw _Pulp Fiction_ four times in theaters.
The core of the movie is its moral angle. Detective Nishi evidently feels himself responsible for the crippling of his partner Horibe, shot and consequently wheelchair-bound while Nishi absents himself to visit his terminally ill wife Miyuki at the hospital, as well as the death of another cop at the hands of an armed robber Nishi was unable to control. Overcome by the awareness of failure and the sentiment of remorse, Nishi quits the force and borrows money from yakuza in order to enable Horibe to become a painter and help the young police widow reduced to working at a fast food stand. And in order to repay the yakuza he buys a stolen taxicab from a junkyard, paints it as a police car, dons patrol uniform, and singlehandedly robs a bank with a toy revolver. The interesting part comes next. While Nishi returns the principal to his exacting creditors, he neglects to pay the interest, knowing full well that this oversight will oblige them to pursue him. Thereupon the profit from his heist underwrites his final farewell to Miyuki on a traditionally sentimental pilgrimage to Mt. Fuji, as Nishi casually dispatches his relentless pursuers and abruptly flabbergasts the occasional salaryman interloper or bystander with his exacting capacity for retaliatory justice coupled with an exquisite disregard of native decorum, in a quintessentially Japanese way of terminal rebellion.
Highlights include indirect depiction of ultraviolence, which is both very Japanese and very revisionist in style. For example, there is a fifteen-second scene in Kurosawa's _Red Beard_, where Toshiro Mifune, who plays a provincial doctor in Tokugawa Japan, is confronted by a dozen yakuza in a whorehouse yard over a sick little girl he intends to rescue therefrom. So we see Mifune, encircled by arrogant louts, somberly dispatch them in a smoothly flowing sequence, visiting upon each with his bare hands the most terrible violence possible, only to survey the therapeutic carnage and express his misgivings about having transgressed the Hippocratic principle to his ambitious young samurai understudy. And now, we have Beat Takeshi boxed in and surrounded by sneering adversaries in the yakuza Benz, swiftly addressing each of them in turn with a revolver abruptly confiscated from their hapless colleague, only to proffer a final posthumous admonition to the inert body of a thrice-thrashed, yet thitherto twice spared pompadour punk. Thus the action has been distilled and compressed, whereas the earlier protagonist's conscientious alter ego has been inverted and mooted.
On a break in their journey, as Miyuki squats at a lake shore to water a bouquet of dead flowers, a boorish interloper upbraids her about the futility of her melancholy gesture, whereupon Nishi abruptly shoves him underwater and colors the lake with blooming petals of his blood, in a warm-up for dealing with the next batch of yakuza pursuers due to catch up with them shortly. The juxtaposition of sentimentality and ultraviolence exemplified in this scene certainly represents a retreat from the more tough-minded narratives of Akira Kurosawa and Hideo Gosha, whose stoic brooding heroes Takeshi Kitano obviously seeks to emulate. But the staccato beat of hard action punctuating the silent contemplative portrayal of the hero's quiet love for his dying wife, equally well rooted in the chambara tradition and especially evocative of Tatsuya Nakadai oyabun's generous resignation to the emerging prior claim on his wife that is left loyally unarticulated by his recovering amnesiac retainer in Gosha's sublime _Hunter in the Dark_, both in munificence of spirit and operatic surfeit of painstakingly suppressed underlying emotion epitomize the Japanese Liebestod suggested by the title, an indigenous plot device doubtless destined to be imitated but unattained by callow American filmmakers.
Cordially -- Mikhail Zeleny@math.ucla.edu * MZ@ptyx.com ** www.ptyx.com God: "Sum id quod sum." ** 7576 Willow Glen Road, Los Angeles, CA 90046 Descartes: "Cogito ergo sum." * 213.876.8234 (fon) * 213.876.8054 (fax) Popeye: "Sum id quod sum et id totum est quod sum." **** www.alonzo.org established on 2.26.1958 ** itinerant philosopher * will think for food
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