Film Notes: Hana-Bi

The fade-in of the Office Kitano production banner provides one of the purest “if you know, you know” feels for devoted cinephiles. The Japanese auteur Takeshi Kitano is known for a very particular flavor of gangster film, always starring himself, that mixes gut-busting violence, poetic still-life scenes, and a surreal sense of humor focused on sight gags.

By his own account, Kitano had a tough road to becoming a filmmaker. He got his start in show business working in yakuza clubs in the 1970s and found success with the comedy duo The Two Beats, leading to his nickname “Beat” Takeshi. By the 1980s, he was a household name in Japan as a TV personality, but audiences laughed at his attempts to play dark, complex characters on film. It wasn’t until 1990’s VIOLENT COP that Kitano was offered the director’s chair (replacing the legendary Kinji Fukusaku) in addition to playing the lead.

With HANA-BI (FIREWORKS), his seventh film as director-star (he also wrote and edited), Kitano perfected his impish, enigmatic screen persona as Nishi, a cop on the edge. His wife is in the hospital with leukemia, and he’s deep in debt to loan sharks to cover her treatment. The couple are also mourning the recent loss of their young daughter. When Nishi’s partner Horibe is paralyzed in a shootout, he descends fully into guilt-ridden despair.

Kitano takes a fractured, elliptical approach to depicting violence, like Peckinpah with frames missing. Yet despite its veneer of deadpan nihilism, this is a deeply emotional story, aided by Joe Hisaishi’s perversely sentimental seaside-jazz score. Nishi’s relationship with his wife plays out in long, dialogue-free scenes in which they appear innocent as children, longing for a past life that will never return.

Fireworks was Kitano’s return to filmmaking after a motorcycle accident that left his face partially paralyzed. He took up painting in his convalescence, creating distinctive images of animals with flowers for heads and eyes. (The literal translation of hana-bi is “fire-flower.”) These appear in the film as creations of the wheelchair-bound ex-cop Horibe.

Kitano’s mastery of his own unique micro-genre earned Fireworks the Golden Lion at the 1997 Venice Film Festival, one of the highest awards in world cinema. A singular, existential vision of defiance in the face of misfortune, Fireworks lingers long after its pyrotechnics fade to silence.