SONATINE

Japan, 1993, 94 mins. 35mm print source: Miramax Films. Written, directed and edited by Takeshi Kitano. Produced by Masayuki Mori, Hisao Nabeshima and Takio Yoshida. Original Music by Joe Hisaishi. Photographed by Katsumi Yanagishima. Art Direction by Osamu Sasaki. Principal Cast: Takeshi Kitano (as Aniki Murakawa), Aya Kokumai (Miyuki), Tetsu Watanabe (Uechi), Masanobu Katsumura (Ryoji), Susumu Terajima (Ken), Ren Osugi (Katagiri), Tonbo Zushi (Kitajima), Kenichi Yajima (Takahashi), Eiji Minakata (The Hit Man).


From a review by Roger Ebert for the Chicago Sun-Times:

"Maybe you're too rich for this business," a friend tells Murakawa, the stone-faced gangster hero of Sonatine. Murakawa, who rarely says anything, has let it slip that he is tired. Very tired. When he is not actually engaged in the business of being a yakuza, he simply stops moving at all, and sits, staring into space, sometimes with a cigarette, sometimes not.

He is tired of living, but not scared of dying, because death, he explains, would at least put an end to his fear of death, which is making his life not worth living. When he explains this perfectly logical reasoning, you look to see if he is smiling, but he isn't. He has it all worked out.

Sonatine is the latest film to be released in this country by Takeshi Kitano, who wrote, directed and edited it-and stars in it under his acting name, Beat Takeshi. It arrives here only a month after Fireworks, his 1997 Venice Film Festival winner, but was made in 1993, the fourth of his seven films. He is the biggest star in Japan right now, and as a filmmaker one of the most intriguing.

This film is even better than Fireworks. It shows how violent gangster movies need not be filled with stupid dialogue, nonstop action and gratuitous gore. Sonatine is pure, minimal and clean in its lines; 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. Murakawa 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.

As the film opens, Murakawa and his crew are being signed by a yakuza overlord to travel to Okinawa, as soldiers on loan to an ally who is facing gang warfare. They sense that something is phony about the assignment. "The last time you sent us out," Murakawa tells his boss, "I lost three men. I didn't enjoy that." Murakawa is correct in his suspicions: The district he controls has become so lucrative that the boss wants to move in and take over.

These yakuza live by a code so deep it even regulates their fury. Murakawa administers a brutal beating to the boss' lieutenant, but they remain on speaking terms. Later, one yakuza stabs another in the stomach. Yet they sit side by side on a bus in Okinawa. "Ice cream?" says the guy who had the knife. "You stabbed me in the belly and it still hurts," the other replies, and we are not quite sure if he is rejecting the ice cream out of anger, or because he doesn't think it will stay down.

In Kitano's universe, violence is as transient as a lightning bolt. It happens, and is over. It means nothing. We sense that in a scene where three men play "paper, rock, scissors" to see who will get to point a pistol at his head and pull the trigger to see if there is a round in the chamber. We see it again in a chilling sequence where a gambler, who didn't want to pay protection, is dunked into the sea; Murakawa gets into a conversation and almost forgets to notice how long the guy has been under. And we see it in the climactic battle scene, played entirely as flashes of lights: Who else would have the wit, or the sadness, to leave the carnage off screen?

Kitano was in a motorcycle accident a few years ago that paralyzed half his face. This film was made before the accident, but there's little difference between the way he appears here and in Fireworks.

The less he gives, the less he reveals, the less he says and does, the more his presence grows, until he becomes the cold, dangerous center of the story. 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.