Despite having no meaningful intentions, I ended up watching quite a few films this week. I’m about to travel to Cyprus, so awful screen will be on hiatus for a bit. Compensating. I’m ok with that. Recovering from five days of LCMF didn’t quite go to plan. I’ve finished writing a book, an actual book about film. It’s not especially long (twenty two thousand words, all told). I’m going to release this as a pdf; probably once I’ve returned from Cyprus and have gained some critical distance from it. I had a lot of fun putting it together, and it’s really a sort of very, very long newsletter, so I think you’ll enjoy it.
Worth also saying that at the end of the month I’ll be travelling to Wroclaw for New Horizons Film Festival. I’ll write something from there. Ralph and I will also be doing an episode of Muub Tube.
There’s a short and very good essay on Godard by Peter Wollen. He wrote it in 1972, just as Godard was getting his teeth into the techniques of a post-68’ cinema. Wollen gets to the bone very quickly; identifying all those features that make Godard’s cinema a counter-cinema – the disembowelment of the organs of orthodox film, how he turned them on their head. Not denying them. Inverting them.
Taking a genre – a genre that is often structured by very rigid norms and conventions – and disrupting our expectations about that genre is quite a good description for what Takeshi Kitano does with Fireworks (1997), because it is a yakuza film (and, to some extent, a police procedural) that spends a lot of time not really being a yakuza film. Not only this, but Kitano messes with our expectations in an often very satisfying way. But if it was a cake, you’d still get to eat it.
That’s because Kitano gives us our violence; he gives us all of the posturing cool (the stylized baggage) that comes with the genre. Nishi – a sullen cop whose wife is dying of Leukaemia – takes part in a botched arrest during which two of his colleagues are shot dead and his partner (Horibe) is paralysed. Nishi retires (or is fired; Kitano doesn’t bother to clear this up) and we jump ahead in time, a few weeks or months. Nishi now wears sunglasses, and he also owes a heap of money to the yakuza. He touts a gun. He blinds a yakuza mobster with a chopstick (framed a la Cronenberg; holding the gorey tendrils of his eyeball between his fingers). He is reeling not only from his wife’s illness, but the death of his daughter. The twitch of his eye (his left eye) tells us all we need to know about how thin a grasp he has on everything.
The first thirty minutes of Fireworks are like a firework, really. It crackles and bursts in a few different places. Nishi is introduced (unnamed; without context) long before he’s introduced to us as a cop. He beats up a car park attendant (seemingly without reason). We feel ambivalently about him from the offset. This happens later, but it’s the first thing we (properly) see. Kitano suggests that this guy is a villain. I didn’t clock that this was Nishi when we eventually see him (he has a quite pronounced twitch in his left eye; hidden previously by the sunglasses). Kitano extracts little fragments of composition – a knife is shot as an extract; the blade and hand framed by the blue of the sky. When it clatters to the floor (kicked away) we jump cut to its skittering across the tarmac. Time is out of joint. Dining at a restaurant (beer; cigarette), Nishi is chatting with his dead colleagues (including Tanaka). They’ve already died; this is a figment. He experiences a flashback to their deaths (shot, in slow motion, from above; a pile of three bodies upon whom eruptions of blood cascade from their backs). Only later do we discover that the man at the bottom of this pile was shooting upward, through them. Kitano gets us, radially, to a place where we can understand what happened; but it’s not dressed up in any kind of psychological anguish, and there’s little urgency. The lighting is always very even, pastel and bright (not warm; bright). Everything is a little blue, a little cold; a little muted. Blood (a deep red) is the primary accent. It gushes from the bodies of his colleagues. It is the death threat painted on the tarmac beneath his car.
Other dramas are stacked side by side. Nishi meticulously plans a heist with the amused aid of a hulking mechanic. This is a very perfunctory bank heist. There’s a road trip (he takes his dying wife, Miyuki, around the slopes of Mt. Fuji). There’s also the police procedural (a former colleague figures out that Nishi had planned the heist, and follows in his wake – just as the yakuza follow, eager to extort money from the now flush Nishi). These pieces flow together really without urgency. Kitano presents them as facts rather than lines of tension. Really the film changes focus, to trace the cautious love that abides between Nishi and Miyuki.
There’s another story here, how Horibe copes with his injury and the subsequent fallout. His wife and daughter abandon him. He attempts suicide (this happens off-screen). He expresses a desire to take up painting. Nishi sends him a huge delivery of art materials – paper and pens and highlighters, even a beret. Throughout Fireworks, we follow Horibe as he works on a series of quite lurid paintings (where the heads of animals are replaced by those of flowers). Kitano spends a lot of time studying these canvases. There’s a very touching sequence where the camera lingers on flowers in a plant shop, and the montage imagines the kinds of compositions that Horibe will create from these fronds and petals. His opus is a vast, dark canvas depicting a field of snow and a night sky, executed in a kind of naive pointillism. At a moment of particular anguish he writes a suicide note against the snow (red on white), before splashing an entire pot of paint onto the surface. He has confronted the bitterness of his paralysis; he has negotiated a kind of truce with it.
Subverting genre conventions might be a very quick way to make an otherwise ordinary film appear more disruptive than it actually is. But I don’t believe that Kitano was setting out, with Fireworks, to make a deconstructivist yakuza flick. He seems more concerned with articulating something about love. Nishi isn’t vengeful; he just bluntly kills the people who are trying to chase him down. Shaking them off – because he’s already had his revenge, having killed the culprit early on in the film.
Nishi is clearly suffering from a profound and immutable anguish. His dying wife, the death of his daughter, the wounding of his partner. The yakuza, the police; these things are interruptions, distractions. Formally, Kitano treats them as such; expunging the film of any palpable narrative tension. You could contrast it with Yamatoya’s Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands (1967), whose story of anguished revenge assumes a very formally jarring and arrhythmic energy; fractured with existential unease and dizzying montage. That too is a yakuza flick, but it’s one that crackles with disorientation. It’s consciously formalist. Kitano doesn’t surface the disquiet; he buries it. Nishi’s eye twitch, the sudden bursts of violence that submerge back into his grey-blue palette; how these acts are kept in a kind of push and pull with moments of pastoral pleasure (Horibe’s painting; the mountains; how Nishi lights a fire on the beach). Somebody somewhere calls his (Kitano’s) approach “uncluttered and distinctive”, and it’s certainly true that he practises real restraint. The confrontation between Nishi and the yakuza is expertly done; the car set against all that snow, crane-shot; the flashes of a gun that goes off (pop, pop, pop). It felt like the kind of alienating/subtracted violence practised by Bill Hader in Barry. It functions through negation, laying the violence before us but refusing to excite it with quick-handed jump cuts. It feels inevitable, alienating.
Particularly memorable is Joe Hisaishi’s score. He’s the ghibli guy. You get this near constant sparkle of nostalgic, easygoing music that is quite at odds with the horrors that Nishi is subjected to. There’s a layer of irony here, quite a big slice of it. You also notice that Horibe’s paintings appear in the background at various points in the film. There’s one in the bank that Nishi robs. There’s another (actually very beautiful painting) in the mountain retreat where Nishi and his wife stay, just before the yakuza catch up with him – a wave of beauty that tugs and nudges at the edge of the film.
I really admire Kitano’s vision – writing, directing, editing, starring in this huge grab-bag of films that are quite at odds with his reputation (in Japan) as a comedic buffoon and gameshow host. You realize that Fireworks – which contains inside of itself two very different films, the violent and the nostalgic – is really quite a good metaphor that speaks to Kitano’s own career. Buffoon and auteur. I really liked Fireworks. Harder going was Kid’s Return, which I watched the next evening; split into two viewing sessions. That’s another yakuza-inflected film that isn’t really about the mob, but about two childhood friends (who are also bullies). It felt less interesting, less formally exciting, but you get pleasantly nudged along by Hisaishi’s score, the silly/nostalgic humour. I’d had about five or six beers by that point, so perhaps I wasn’t particularly attuned to what was going on.
Crane shots. I almost forgot to write about these. There are a series of crucial crane shots that function at particular points of revelation in the film; moments of decision. The first occurs when Nishi approaches the burly mechanic, and the crane swirls over and around his shoulder, settling level with their heads as they begin to haggle over the taxi that he’ll buy (stolen; he’ll respray it to look like a cop car). The second occurs after the shooting in the car, against the snow. It spirals in a very dizzying way and then arches up and over the scene to settle on Nishi as he walks away, raises his gun, and fires (emptily) on a fleeing mobster. The shots are really quite theatrical and unnecessary, but they speak to the kind of dissonance that structures nearly all of his films (it seems) – between the graceful and the bluntly violent. It feels like Kitano is saying yes, you can have it both ways. Long takes let us really peer, closely, at his protagonists. Their expressions don’t give us much. It’s not really important that we elicit precisely what is going through their minds at any given juncture in time, but rather than we sense their submerged torment – the ambience of their struggle between violence and atonement. There are countless takes where we just observe Nishi or Miyuki or Horibe staring; either at us (down the lens) or at another object or subject. He speaks very little. We’re supposed to grasp (I think) toward the overall texture of his feeling; how fragile it is. There’s a third crane shot. It pans across a beach and alights on a pleasant (probably fictive) scene just before Nishi shoots himself and his wife. A last, idyllic moment of tenderness – that same H score – which is really a very tragic and upsetting moment. That dissonance again.
Actually, I’m led to believe that Fireworks is much more formally erratic than his earlier (more austere) films, which are said to be more like deconstructed cop films. I’ll have to watch more to understand just how different they are. I will literally do that, because he is just so good. Not perfect, probably; but really profoundly exciting and a little disturbing.
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