Life, death

Just watched "Beat" Takeshi Kitano's Sonatine, which he directed and starred in. It was quite interesting; plot is roughly a yakuza leader in Tokyo is sent by his boss to Okinawa, ostensibly to mediate a turf war, in reality to set him up so the boss can take over his increasingly lucrative turf.

The movie starts with a simple, synthesized song that gets in your head and recurs a few more times. A couple of early scenes set the sense that for the yakuza, violence is just part of their job; indeed, a theme running throughout the movie seems to be the juxtaposition of violence and boredom, murder and everday time-passing.

-Kitano's character, Murakama, oversees the 'scaring' of an illegal gambling operator who refuses to pay off the yakuza, they dunk him a couple of times into a harbor via a crane, the second time they keep him down too long while they're talking of other things; he calmly walks off and says doesn't matter, hush it up.

-There's a stabbing and then scuffle in the office between some new and veteran gangsters while Murakama's talking to the yakuza boss' second in command, they just watch impassively.

The movie really starts once they go to Okinawa; against the blue sky and lush green backdrop the gangsters hurry up and wait, holing out after they get drawn into a murderous battle with one of the factions they're ostensibly there to mediate with. The beachfront cottage they spend their time with becomes the set for all sortsof odd but telling pass-times--veteran yakuza Murakam winds up digging holes in the beach and laughing as his unwitting underlings fall into them, drawn forth by his summons.

A side plot develops when Murakama stops a rape from taking place; it turns out the attempted rapist was the woman's husband (I believe). The two start hanging out, she admiringly tells him how much she loves tough guys and how he's so great and unafraid of death. He says "I learned to shoot fast, because I get scared very quickly." And then adds, "when you're scared all the time, you almost wish you were dead."

Maybe the most extraordinary moment in the film is when the yakuza, under a full moon, fight a mock battle on the beach, using somesortof fireworks gun that we don't have here in the U.S. (it's a long tube that keeps shooting out jets of flame). The reds and whites against the dark sky with hazy smoke in the air makes for beautiful cinematography. Despite Murakama's seeming silliness during the beach part of the film, it's clear he's still a ruthless gangster--he pulls out his gun and uses it during the mock battle, to much laughter but his side also prevails.

The movie ends with betrayal and murder; Murakama's gang dwindles to him, a young gangster, and the woman. No matter; they cut the power at a hotel where his double-crossing higher-up and other leaders are meeting with one of the island's factions, and he walks in with a machine gun and wipes them all out.

The movie's mostly stylized--he kills in a larger-than-life manner, with no expression on his face. At the end, in a crazy twist, he's driving back from the wipe-out the next morning; he'd previously turned down an offer by the betrayers to stay on Okinawa and give up his turf in Tokyo, in exchange for control of part of Okinawa. So you know even for all his sense of being on holiday, and his statement early in the movie that he's thinking about retiring, he's only going out on his terms.

Yet it's still a shock when he pulls the car over to the side of the road, just over the hill from where the woman's waiting next to the ocean for him, and shoots himself in the head.

Why does he do this? I'm not sure. It's surprising, yet it fits with the way his character is--it's someone who is sentimental and kind, yet also ruthless. Most normal people would've taken the offer of retirement up, and stayed in a cottage by the sea, with or without the woman (he'd already told her he was going back to Tokyo, so I'm not sure his driving toward the cottage at the end of the movie meant he was going to be with her, she's really nothing special).

But things like honor and respect mean something to him, so he walks into the meeting room and blasts the other gangsters to bits. Maybe this means there's now a price on his head from the big boss back home--but I don't think something like that would lead him to take his own life.

So I go looking online, to see what the reviewers say. I'm surprised at how idiotic the Times' review is--Stephen Holden seems not to have understood the movie, even aside from the flat-out mistakes made in his review, 'Sonatine': No Rest for the Weary in a World of Violence.He claims the machine gun scene is "left to our imaginations." It's not really, we see bodies falling and people shooting back. He says a "group of young hoodlums awaiting instructions playfully stage a mock gangland war"; not really, Murakama's part of the battle and he's neither a young hoodlum nor awaiting instructions. He says "much of the film is set at a mobster's seaside retreat"; the cottage is owned by a relative of one of the gangsters who's out of town, part of the whole movie is how these supposedly glamorous gangsters are always doing things like driving around in substandard cars and holing up in dirty, makeshift places, bored with nothing but themselves for amusement.

In a key misunderstanding, he writes "What else do these young hoods do when they're not busy killing one another, the movie wonders? Why, of course, they spend their time coltishly pretending to kill one another." The movie shows the young gangsters, and Murakama: creating a sumo ring, re-entacting a stage performance, playing dress-up, playing with dolls and paper figures, playing frisbee, playing Russian roulette... the whole point of the movie is these guys are very Japanese, and there's a lot of both violence and odd tenderness in Japanese male culture. Therefore, it's not significant that the young hoods enact mock battles in their spare time--that's in there because they're young men first and foremost; it's the scenes of them hanging out by the beach that are really the interesting ones.

Another thing Holden doesn't get is why these guys are immune to violence erupting around them. He writes "During these eruptions, witnesses remain impassive and poker-faced as though they were frozen in a trance." It's actually the opposite--they're not in a trance or frozen at all. They're relaxed and in a normal state, ready to act if necessary, otherwise it's no big deal to them and is just part of their surroundings.

Holden's failure to get the film leads him to literally conclude: "After each scene, Murakama turns away in disgust, his eyes a little deader than before. As gorgeous as it is, ''Sonatine" does not glorify violence."

Murakama never turns away in disgust. He turns away because there's no reason for him to gawk. It's time to go on to the next thing, it's all in a day's work.

The film definitely doesn't glorify violence, but the way in which it does it isn't by pretending a man who's spent his entire life in a gang is suddenly going be disgusted by violence; it does it by showing how it's no big deal, nothing special, no mystery or mystique here. One concrete example is how when the woman asks Murakam who the first person he killed was, Murakama responds matter-of-factly it was his father. He explains why in a sentence, gives a short laugh, and that's that. No wallowing, no disgust, no psychological unburdening necessary.

Since Holden's no use I turn to Roger Ebert. He writes:

I was reminded of Jean-Pierre Melville's ``Le Samourai'' (1967), another film about a professional killer who is all but paralyzed by existential dread. Neither movie depends on extended action scenes because neither hero finds them fun. There is the sense in a lot of American action movies that Bruce Willis or Arnold Schwarzenegger enjoy the action in the way, say, that they might enjoy a football game. Murakama and the French samurai (Alain Delon) do jobs--jobs they have lost the heart for, jobs that have extinguished in them the enjoyment of life.

I disagree with the 'paralyzed with existential dread' line, but the rest is accurate. Ebert continues "In Kitano's universe, violence is as transient as a lightning bolt. It happens, and is over. It means nothing." And Ebert says:

And in his willingness to let characters languish in real time, to do nothing in between the moments of action, he forces us to look into their eyes and try to figure them out. Films that explain nothing often make everything clear. Films that explain everything often have nothing to explain.

Yeah, I don't think Ebert really got the movie, either. It's one of those reviews that doesn't grapple with anything; maybe Roger's written so many of these that he's tired of it, but I think he's just doing the paint a picture of the movie's general mood and avoid specifics.

So we turn to Mr. Jonathan Rosenbaum (like me, he's gotta be wondering what the title means, right?) First, I notice he gives it a 3-star review, making it a 'must-see.' I think he's right--Americans are used to the stupid we're-not-glamorizing-nudge-nudge-wink-wink-mob-life Godfather films and Sopranos show.

Right away, Rosenbaum tells us something new:

I've only seen three of his last four films--Sonatine (1993), Kids Return (1996), and Fireworks (1997), which played at the Music Box for two weeks last month--yet all three share an almost primitive quality, wholly unconcerned with the conventional rules of narrative structure. This seems entirely appropriate for a filmmaker who claims to shape his stories around compelling images. "When I'm working on the script," Kitano has said, "the visuals come first, before the dialogue."

This totally makes sense to me; the plot of Sonatine is confusing, but the images are always clean and, for a gangster film, it's the nature scenes that stick with you.

Rosenbaum next writes:

Kitano, an inventive and compelling visualist, essentially stops the story and creates a series of spellbinding images and set pieces that are so poetic one hardly notices the dangling narrative. For instance, in order to relieve their boredom, the men invent a game using paper figures crafted in the form of sumo wrestlers, which move like pawns across a board when the ground is struck. Moments later, on the beach, the men repeat the stylized gestures; their movements parallel the sumo wrestlers' ritualized actions, except the manner is theatrical, artificial, closer to No theater. In another sequence, the men form lines on a darkened beach and stage a fake war, launching Roman candles at each other. The succession of ecstatic images is broken up by the playful and ironic Murakama, who insists on firing his gun.

These scenes are basically irrelevant; their effect on the story line is inconsequential. Yet they subtly impart the idea that whatever follows is impossible to predict. With Kitano, narrative and plot become wholly secondary to the emotions, moods, and associations his images conjure. Texture is more important than story. These sequences illustrate Kitano's method of shifting between engagement and detachment, and his resolve to confound our own sense of anticipation. Kitano invites his audience's willful surrender to the experiences and the uncommon depth of feeling his movies are predicated on. Sonatine doesn't encourage a straight reading, where logic dictates meaning and importance. When our normal responses are broken down, we relate more directly to the film.

A director like John Woo will use violence to express his characters' inner conflicts, but Kitano designs violent, horrifying images to explore their emotional aftermath. In a 1995 essay in Film Comment, Chuck Stephens pointed out, "Each of Kitano's films embrace death as a form of self-determination, and yet each offers an underlying concern for victims, outsiders and children, and for the consequences of violence, both on the body and in society." Like Wong Kar-wai, Kitano seems drawn to themes of loneliness and isolation (a car runs along a desolate stretch of road; a man in a wheelchair serenely stares out at a vast sea). This melancholia--the frustration between what one desires and what is available--runs throughout his work. Suicide is also a recurring theme. It's the culmination not of sorrow or despair or a political statement against state oppression but the logical conclusion of the warrior code.

Yeah, that's exactly it. The plot in the film is almost incidental to the images; unlike most gangster films where the violence is glorified by being at the center of everyone's thoughts and actions and hence the audience's anticipation (wow, what a great gun scene!), Kitano isn't awed by the power of the gun, he's more interested in the people wielding the weapons--not just as triggermen, but as people who, bored at the beach, will do all sorts of random but interesting things, some linked to their violent life, others not.

Rosenbaum ends with this:

Kitano has his problems; for instance, he hasn't quite figured out how to create fully dimensional, interesting women. But at a time when action movies typically hand us a canned experience, his pictures carry a charge of originality. He's fully attuned to the emotional consequences of his choices, and his films impart something quite free, daring, and beautiful. He seems to have no real equivalent in the American cinema, or indeed in popular culture.

So no one's yet talked about the suicide, or the title; but Rosenbaum definitely gets the film.

There's a review on IMDb, by an avid fan who goes by the moniker Sonatine97, that I think gets the film:

But eventually even the beach hut where they live is no longer safe from the assassin's bullet and so Kitano has no other choice but to face his rivals once and for all in a bloody gun battle finale.

And so ends the film. It is not a happy film with no satisfying "Hollywoodesque" ending. Far from it, the ending only illustrates the working mind of Kitano at the time. In fact there are many examples within the film that underlines the bleak suicidal tendencies of his mind for real, especially the Russian Roulette scene.

It is also interesting that these gangsters think nothing of their own lives or safety: they accept their fate as a death-wish. They have witnessed so much death in their lives that they have lost their morality & humanity in themselves and to other people. So it is no surprise that during the various gun battles between rival groups neither Kitano or his men hide behind furniture in order to avoid the bullets. Instead they stand erect like statues firing their guns, hoping for the best waiting to be killed by their enemy in full view.

The life of the Yakuza in the context of this film, therefore, counts for little. They have no life, only a limited existence. There are few highlights - such as the Sumo scene, the firework fight and even the scene where Aya Kokumai removes her t-shirt in front of Kitano so that she is semi-nude before him. And yet not even this makes an impression on him. He is has become such an empty shell that even his sensual nature has long since gone, such is the life of a Yakuza warlord.

I think the poster overstates the bleakness of the characters' outlooks; but the rest is accurate.

A post on Amazon from someone with a Japanese name has the answer to one of my questions:

[T]he original title is "Sonachine", not "Sonatine." Sonachine is an indigenous style of music of Okinawa where much of the story unfolds. Sonatine is a classical composition form. Very different vibe indeed.

Hmm, so the score becomes even more important. Maybe it's like sonachine is the background music for Okinawa, echoing how gunfire/fireworks always seems to accompany the gangsters?

And I guess the answer to the suicide may be in order to be a gangster, life and death can't be a big deal to you. The character's more or less done what he's set out to do in life; why not take your own life, instead of waiting for it to be taken from you?

It's chilling when you read how Kitano a few months after filming Sonatine nearly died in a car accident he's since described as an unconscious suicide attempt. I guess he felt, like the character in Sonatine, that he'd reached the end of his road. How wrong he is.

Uncredited photo of Takeshi Kitano in various places online.