"You have to prepare for dying, even while you are living your life."
-Takeshi Kitano,
Film Comment
Hanna-Bi marked a rude but pleasant awakening for me, introducing me to the work of Takeshi Kitano. (I missed KIds Return inspite of a luxurious one day repertory stint at the Bytowne...) It Hanna-Bi is linked but not entirely representative of the director's previous work. It is often in such cases when a filmmaker is marking new territory that extremely accomplished work is done. The Sweet Hereafter was an exception for specific reasons, but Lost Highway, Dead Man or Crash all make the point. All credit here is to Kitano who wrote, directed, edited as well as stars in the film. This is perhaps the closest The filmmaker can come to serving as true artist, true analog to the mode of a novelist or painter, as opposed to some hybrid of artist-manager. For the most part today, even in cases of responsible filmmaking, it is not at all clear that a single person's creative thrust anchors a film. Kundun and Happy Together for instance, both remarkable, cannot be credited soley to their respective director's efforts. This is neither good nor bad, although in a case like Hanna-Bi there is much less ambiguity as to the source of what is being ennunciated by the film. The result is a level of coherence that is absent from most films; while Scorcese or Wong are able to marshall the efforts of collaborators into a unified voice most films produced via the conventional collaborative model end up feeling like six people shouting at you and each other.
Hanna-Bi is well served by this unity of thrust, since it is in fact a very ambitious project. There are in fact two distinct layers to the film. The first is the content itself, which is both a yakuza crime fiilm as well as a melodrama. Nishi, the protagonist embodied by Kitano is a taciturn policeman who is confronting two sets of psychological demons. The first is related to a less than smooth sting operation, while the second centers around the fact that his wife is dying. Conventional wisdom would suggest that a film with this much 'premise' should set about economically and efficiently relate the plot until by the end it is hurtling at light speed to as big a bang as its budget will allow. Instead there is a whole other layer to Kitano's film where one would least expect to find it; in the formal devices used. Kitano constructs his shots and by extension his entire film with razour sharp precision and with absolute disregard to textbook storytelling. Long scenes are spent in absolutely no service whatsoever to the empirical events being narrated. And yet it is these moments that are most articulate in commenting on the loneliness and alienation that Nishi feel. Kitano foreshadows this method of revealing truth through form as opposed to content through the first third of his film. The sting operation referred to is shown several times and yet it serves only to confuse. Even the source of bullets is not clear. The viewer is left with recourse only to articulations between shots, compositions, silence and Nishi's austere stare as the only legitimate signs of the film's concerns.
Although a number of sources have emphasized the content-linked themes of the film, such as sacrifice, identity and in some sense redemption, these seem to be cursory or at least only part of what make Hanna-Bi intriguing. What truly is inspiring is the density of the film's treatment of violence. It is a study of clinical precision in this regard. In an interview in Film Comment (March-April 1998) Kitano ws quite specific about the approach he wished to take to violence in Hanna-Bi. It is an approach not unlike Michael Haneke's in Funny Games (yet to be released in Ottawa) which exposes the mundaneity of violence as it is used in conventional cinema. To this end Hanna-Bi makes use offscreen space to haunt the viewer with allusions to the acts comitted. We are shown either the brutal and humiliating aftermaths (in the restaurant early in the film, at the beach towrds the end..) or the spontaneous outburst. It has become Nishi's last resort and only known way to express affection. (Not unlike the protagonists in Tokyo Fist) On this basis the final scene is one of excruciating compassion.
It is the evolution that Nishi goes through to get to such a point that maintains the interest of the content-linked elements of the film. The perfectionist manner in which Nishi raises money and the meandering journey it spawns are more literal components of this evolution. Throughout there are continuous shifts in tone and possible motivations that the characters never seem one-dimensional or just tools in a theorem. There is no easily explicable or definable scapegoat to which Nishi's behaviour can be attributed and as such the viewer is forced to confront the possible sources and to begin to assess the precise effects of the various acts of brutality that are depicted. These stand in counterpoint to the artwork produced at intervals by another character in the film (whom I cannot divulge if i want to limit the amount of plot I explain). These paintings and drawings serve as perfect punctuation to a film as aesthetically accomplished as this one. Not to be missed.
-- -Omar Odeh http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/3920
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