Good-as-deadfellas - films of Japanese actor-director-writer Takeshi Kitano

ArtForum, April, 1997 by Howard Hampton

Kitano doesn't act in his latest work, Kid's Return (1996), and his centrifugal presence is missed. He hasn't found other actors who can impart the same sensibility to the material, which after a pleasantly shambling opening settles into a fairly predictable melange of gangster, boxing, and coming-of-age movie elements. There is a tantalizing glimpse in Kid's Return of a different, far more interesting milieu: If the film had followed the pair of young comics through the ranks of Japanese showbiz, it might have found a much more personal tone (perhaps Kitano could have played a mentor-antagonist and explored his roots in comedy, always a great breeding ground for hostility). As it is, Kid's Return is a polite, well-made, rather boring elegy of a film (having premiered at Cannes, it has the hothouse air of a film tailored for the international festival circuit).

Kitano injects more of his own idiosyncratic aura into his brief supporting role in Takashi Ishii's elegant splatterfest Gonin, almost to the verge of self-parody. As a killer who again forces himself on his partner, the role's a far cry from his straitlaced cameo opposite a dim Keanu Reeves in Johnny Mnemonic (imagine what a perverse coupling that might have been). Though his turn in Gonin (a standard crime thriller taken to baroque, horror-show extremes) underscores some of his own latent conventionality, it also serves to link him with the largely unknown tradition of the Japanese avant-pulp underground: films like the cockeyed master Seijun Suzuki's breathtaking Branded to Kill and Atsuchi Yamatoya's free-jazz skullfuck Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands, both of which anticipated David Lynch's Lost Highway by a good thirty years. Sonatine, Boiling Point, and Violent Cop may be seen as the exquisitely unlikely terminus of that tendency (sadism as epistemology), abstracted and recollected in dispassion. So while Sonatine is a magnificent summing up, it also feels like the end of the read. Kitano's future greatness won't be in small films like Kid's Return or, I suspect, in going back to gangland, but in bringing the sweet unreason of Sonatine to bear on mainstream institutions like those of politics, finance, and entertainment - the places where the real bodies are buried.

Howard Hampton is a regular contributor to Artforum and Film Comment.