Two great works from the master of japanese cinema postmodern, Takeshi Kitano, are again made visible in the room : Hana-Bi and Kids Return.
After the came out happy in July 2016 of Kikujiro, distributor Rabbia extends the rediscovery of the colossal work of Takeshi Kitano – coming out August 9, 2017 KIDS RETURN (1996) HANA-BI (1997, one of his three greatest films). In the extension, already, the rediscovery of the obscure HAS a SCENE at THE SEA (1991) is promised for 2018 ! For this summer, two works that contemplate with great sense plastic of the author of the violence, a joint police and yakuza. Twice, an entry that is masterful and playful, simple and dramatic, mundane and spiritual in the cinema of Kitano–san.
KIDS RETURN / KIZZU RITÂN (1996)
If all the plot opens, closes and focuses largely on the friendship between Masaru and Shinji, the other three young men revolve around them and paint a whole portrait of a youth in Osaka perdition. Between boxing and crime, the comic scene and the life of the japanese company, with its delicacy customary, Kitano sketch a gallery of characters as we take pleasure, as in a Hawks, to attend and, over the revisions, to find.
This is the sixth feature film account can be as one of the least memorable of Kitano. Because he pours it into a neo-realistic short-term more than in his singular poetry of painting in haiku broken, which is exemplary of A Scene at the Sea, Dolls or Takeshis’. Minority related and proportional to the magnitude of the Work. KIDS RETURN is a great movie. This delivers it with humility and inspiration of nostalgia towards the adolescence. Everything opens up on the manzai : a couple of comical. Form of performance with which Kitano started 25 years ago under the name of “Two Beats”. Handed then stage through its care to nearly 50 years. Souvenir video :
As is his nature, the music contributes sparingly to the general atmosphere. In this case, his faithful collaborator, Joe Hisaishi (composer also true of Miyazaki), sign a theme that is both nervous and melancholy, between the shamisen and rock electric guitar folk. All the emotions that run through the film are summarized in this composition : the eyes of Kitano seat between a juvenility recovered, and bitterness choked lost years.
Resolutely, before KIDS RETURN, says a love for boxing and a taste for the abandoned, the marginalized, the minorities. This meeting of the out-of-field is to be found even in the corner of the eye. Unlike a Takashi Miike , who, when he makes a movie of yakuza, it increase the strengths of the genre to the point of exhaustion, Kitano subtracted from the springs to reach the epicenter. The form of the yakuza is almost a pretext, a figure parallel which moves the filmmaker to let flourish the human. And no one better than that son of a yakuza boss may not succeed in breaking through the essence, as Wakamatsu in its infancy.
HANA BI (1997)
Seventh film of Kitano. Considered very generally, and rightly, as one of the works of the cardinal of the author, and one of the film capital of the 90’s. The aura of a Golden Lion at the Venice film Festival, this “policeman” mental and intimate, major and secret is both the realization of a man, a painter, an actor but also a filmmaker at the peak of his creation.
Playing back-and-forth between the present and the past, developed at the turn of a memory hit as a film of Resnais or Kobayashi, this masterpiece unfolds, through the figure of the detective Yoshitaka Nishi (played by “Beat” Takeshi). Around him, cultivated with development of the figures of his wife suffering from leukemia and his comrade made a paraplegic due to a burr. What remains of the most beautiful in this film, often that of a survivor, haunted by the death and worked through the grief, it is that hands of a violence bubbling resist the spirit of camaraderie, the joy of carefree to make your life a playground. To be convinced, beyond these two coming out with that Kikujiro, simply revise the end as playful as it is tragic of Sonatina.
When Kitano turns these sixth and seventh film, he himself is the survivor of a motorcycle accident that almost took her life and left him paralyzed part of the face. The remarkable feature of this facies singular. The result of his work will be marked in depth. This miracle of successfully carry a film sign of the maturity of a style while maintaining the innocence of the gaze, the recklessness of the experiment, the sensitivity of the test for aesthetics, this is probably what an artist can offer more valuable, whatever it is, whatever the means of expression. The filmmaker does not, moreover, something else : ” I would like to preserve indefinitely my sensitivity as a child. Too mature, too rich I become, I want to stay honest, true to myself, to my truth. “
It is not necessary to be mistaken : HANA-BI is not a creation of aesthete firefighter who flirterait with complacency. It grows, by its games and breaking his bent for irony, a flavor that is unique, often playful, and joyful. Kitano is keatonesque. A Keaton agree of tragedy, immersed in cruelty quasi-inherent in japanese cinema, but which retains its pleasure, with an air of do not touch it, for the burlesque of the body.
To the front of the films of Takeshi Kitano, which you can revisit in room 3 avatars this summer thanks to The Rabbia, can easily return to the cinephile initiated as the viewer dilettante the word of Hugo about Shakespeare : “I admire all, as a bully”.
Flavien Poncet
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