This is a most extraordinary film from Japanese writer/director Takeshi Kitano, who is all things to all media in Japan – he's a comic, a novelist, an artist, a television performer extraordinaire, a filmmaker, a newspaper columnist and a poet. With Hana-bi, which translates roughly as 'fireworks', he creates the world of former police detective Nishi. He's a complex man on a short fuse, capable of explosive violence and just as capable of inordinate compassion.
As Kitano plays with the time frame of the narrative we gradually piece together the fragments that make up Nishi's life – his young daughter has died, his wife is terminally ill and while he was with his wife in hospital two of his police colleagues suffered from his absence – one was killed, the other consigned to a wheelchair for life. And as if that isn't enough to bear, he's in debt to the yakuza.
It's so hard to show you any excerpt from this film that will give you the idea of it as a whole. It has an alienated feel that relates to the films of Jean Pierre Melville, graphic violence that connects you to Peckinpah and an austerity that is totally Japanese. But more than anything else, and I suppose I came away from the film with this impression because the second half is so much gentler, it's a film of great compassion. It's also about honour.
Kitano, using his stage name of Beat Takeshi, plays Nishi with minimal dialogue, wearing dark glasses for much of the time, his scarred face wearing an expression of resigned grimness. And yet somehow he gives us access to this character through his actions. He is what he does. Miyuki, the wife, is gloriously, delicately played by Kayoko Kishimoto. The paintings in the film were done by Kitano, the art of this film, the first of his to get a general release in this country, is all his. An extraordinary talent, a great movie.
