Kikujiro

"After ‘Hana-Bi,’ I couldn’t help feeling that my films were being stereotyped: ‘gangster, violence, life and death.’ It became difficult for me to identify with them. So I decided to try and make a film no one would expect from me. To tell the truth, the story of this film belongs to a genre which is outside me speciality. But I decided to make this film because it would be a challenge for me to cope with this ordinary story and try to make it my very own through my direction, and I tried a lot of experimets with imagery. I think it ended up being a very strange film with my upsetting people’s emotions in a positive way."

In which the erstwhile ‘coolest man in Japan’, ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano decides he’s better than cool, he’s warm - to the consternation of Sonatine fans everywhere. No, I don’t know what he was thinking, either. To remake Old Yeller, taking on that plum role of the dog; to remake Gloria (again), stepping into Gena Rowland’s high-heeled shoes; to remake Central Station (already) because it won Fernanda Montenegro, if not eternal fame, then at least an Oscar nomination…?

Far-fetched, granted, but no more so than Takeshi’s own rationale: ‘After Hana-Bi I couldn’t help feeling my films were being stereotyped: gangster, violence and death. I found it had become difficult to identify myself with them. So I decided to try and make a film no one would have predicted.’

What better way to jettison that tough guy yakuza persona than by playing a yakuza? Difference being, presumably, that this time he’s playing it for yucks and sniffles. Hang on, though! Anyone who’s seen a Kitano movie will know he’s always been closer to Buster Keaton than Charles Bronson. Any anyone who saw Hana-Bi will know he’s not averse to tugging the heart strings. So what’s new? Only that he’s stuck himself with the corniest of plot staples: nine-year-old Masao lives with his grandmother and yens to visit the mother he’s never known. Cue begrudged bonding with recalcitrant small-time hood Kikujiro (Takeshi rather immodestly hogging the title role). Emotionally shameless, the film’s also very amusing in places. Imperiously uninterested in words, Takeshi even abandons his own screenplay, allowing the movie to drift off into a series of playful japes concocted for the amusement of the boy, presented with visual ingenuity but little editorial restraint. Sonatine variations in a minor key - very minor.

He’s not called Beat Takeshi for nothing. The beat character he plays in Kikujiro is a good-for-nothing, too.

Japan’s artistic jack-of-all-trades is called Takeshi Kitano as writer-director. As performer, he is Beat Takeshi. Whatever the name, you can’t beat Takeshi.

Here, he plays a bumptious ne’er-do-well who ends up taking a 9-year-old boy on a search for his mother. Kitano has forsaken the overt violence of his cop thrillers for this variation of a road movie. The comic drama is refreshingly anti-sentimental but will break your heart anyway. The film marks another departure for Kitano. It is visually playful, featuring the writer-director-star’s own cartoon inserts and fantasy sequences not ordinarily associated with the creator of Violent Cop and Boiling Point. Some work better than others.

Masao (Yusuke Sekiguchi) is a latchkey kid who comes home after school to his grandmother’s empty house in Tokyo to find only food waiting for him. His father is dead and his mother lives far away, but Masao - who has the grave, patient look of a child who is not expecting much - stumbles upon her address. A friend of his grandmother’s volunteers her layabout husband to take the boy to track down the mother.

Kitano plays the husband. He’s a two-bit gambler, beat up by life but not beat down by it. He has the puffy face of a barfly. The halves of his face don’t match, and he’s got a tic. His voice sometimes sounds like a gargle. His walk is a bent-knee shuffle. He doesn’t particularly like kids.

Something of a scoundrel, this Japanese W.C Fields is not about getting the kid to fork over money to gamble on the bicycle races. When they’re on the road, he’s not above pretending to be blind if that will get them a ride, or putting a spike in the road to blow out the tires of passing cars. He calls people "idiots" and "morons" and gives them accurate if unflattering nicknames, such as Fatso and Baldy. He calls the kid a brat. When serious trouble comes, he also can look his fate straight in the eye without fear.

Trouble is not hard to find. He goes out of his way looking for it. He steals a cab when he thinks the driver is taking them for a ride. He picks a fight with a truck driver.

Called only "hey, mister," by the boy, this unlikely substitute parent is nameless but very recognisably human. People will see parts of themselves in him. Early on, the man’s wife scolds a bunch of teenagers and tells them to "stop playing gangster." In this film, Kitano has stopped playing gangster, too. As director, he ducks opportunities to show overt violence. It occurs offscreen or in long shot, or he cuts away from it and shows only the results. On one occasion, remarkably, Kikujiro, manages to present a case of molestation without treating it as if it were the end of the world, and even with a certain comic element. Life goes on. The movie is not only anti-sentimental, it is anti-hysterical.

The pair of travellers come across, among others, some Japanese Hells Angels, who are not what they seem, and an ominous carnival hustler, who is. Kitano has an offhand approach to setting up scenes and is deliberately anticlimactic. A lot goes unexplained. He expects us to fill in the blanks from our own experience of life.

There are wonderful flights of fantasy. The boy discovers the man has a tattoo across his back that shows there is more to his story than we have seen. The world is alive with spirits under the surface, some of them demons, and they are made visible.

At one point, he follows Charlie Chaplin’s footsteps down that long road to the horizon. Even so, Beat Takeshi may have given up the gangster, but he’s not gone soft.

Compiled by Tyneside Cinema

10 Pilgrim Street Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 6QG

With the assistance of Northern Arts.

Kikujiro	Beat Takeshi
Masao	Yusuke Sekiguchi
Kikujiro’s Wife	Kayoko Kishimoto
Masao’s Grandmother	Kazuko Yoshiyuiki
Biker/Fatso	Great Gidayu
Biker/Baldy	Rakkyo Ide