Takeshi Kitano's Fireworks (Hana-Bi)
Dateline: 09/15/00
It
must happen to everybody: a good movie slips by unseen, and years later you
discover it in a dusty corner at your local video store, and then you can't
believe you missed it the first time around. While it may be embarrassing for
the dedicated film lover to admit this, it can even be more fun to discover
this way than to see it while everybody is talking about it. I just made one
such happy and somewhat embarrassing discovery myself: Kitano Takeshi and Hana-Bi
(literally, flower of fire, translated as Fireworks).
It's not as if this film didn't make any waves. It frequently ranks in many critics' top 10 lists, not just of 1997, but of the entire freshly expired decade. It won a truckload of fancy awards, among them the 1997 Golden Lion at Venice. But somehow it slipped by me entirely. Now I've made up for it, ordered the DVD, and watched it over and over and over again, because I am happy to report, the movie really is that good.
The film's about a cop gone bad, about a crippled man turned painter, about cruel yakuza gangsters, about death conquered, and it features glue sniffing junk yard workers, a beautifully conceived and executed bank robbery, the secret links between flowers in bloom and the animals of the night, and a broken kite. The film is painfully slow, achingly poetic, and gut-splatteringly violent.
But one thing after another: Mr. Nishi (Takeshi Kitano) is a quiet cop with a fatally ill wife who is driven over the edge when one of his partners is paralyzed, the other killed during a shockingly bloody shootout. "It's not your fault," a surviving colleague tells him, meaning, of course, the exact opposite.
But Mr. Nishi, brilliantly cool with his dark suit, his dark glasses, and a strange nervous twitch, doesn't show any emotions although his life and those around him are falling to pieces.
In this film, emotions don't show at first, and just when you're fooled into believing that the protagonists might be horrifyingly cold specimens of humans, they reveal themselves in actions that can make your heart break.
Thus, when Mr. Nishi sends presents to the survivors of the scenes of carnage that break up the shimmering surface of the film, or when he resigns, robs a bank and double-crosses the Tokyo Yakuza, we realize what must be going on behind the silent mask of the ultra cool cop. Everything here is subtly displaced, and as the film progresses to its unavoidable, heart wrenching conclusion, the scenes that matter most happen off camera. The surface hardly registers a ripple, and the film's effect is stronger because of it.
Page Two: A New Genre
pictures courtesy of New Yorker Films/Office Kitano
