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313 Weird and Wonderful Takeshi Kitano’s Kikujiro I’m finally starting to understand Takeshi Kitano’s movies, though given that his specialty seems to be a mixture of violence, slapstick, and sentimentality, I’m not sure I’ll ever be a convert. Still, I found Kikujiro (1999), his eighth feature, much more affecting than the other three features I’ve seen. One of the fascinating things about Kikujiro, which has virtually no violence, is that it seems both more mainstream and more experimental in form than the other Kitano movies I’ve seen. It changes style so often that it all but eliminates narrative. It’s divided into sections like a photo album, with photos and captions doubling as chapter headings. It has intricately choreographed expressionist dream sequences, extended gags in extreme long shot that all but convert the main characters into balls ricocheting through pinball machines, and absurd physical gags in medium shot (as when the hero tries to swim) that take the form of frozen tableaux and provoke blank stares from other characters. It’s full of strange flights of fancy that come out of nowhere and go nowhere. And along with the laughs, it creates a sense of loss so strong and grievous that this feeling may stick with you for days. Yes, it’s sentimental, but it’s also highly atypical and downright weird. And it’s been haunting me ever since I saw it a year ago at the Locarno Film Festival. A statement by the writer-director-editor-star suggests that it’s supposed to be and do all of the above: ‘‘After Fireworks, 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 my specialty. 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 experiments with imagery. I think it ended up being a very strange film with my trademark all over it. I hope to continue upsetting people’s expectations in a positive way.’’ Generic expectations aside, Kitano’s reputation in Japan is based on far more than what he’s done as a film director. As a comic performer, he’s been around for a quarter of a century, having started out as half of a comic duo known as the Two Beats (playing Beat Takeshi—a stage name he still uses as an actor—alongside 314 ESSENTIAL CINEMA Beat Kiyoshi). He evolved into a TV personality in the early 80s and in recent years has been appearing weekly on no less than eight or nine programs, which range from sitcoms to game shows. He didn’t begin directing until 1989. (When I was in Tokyo last December, it took only a bit of channel surfing to find him.) Somewhat abrasive and even abusive in manner, he probably shares as many traits with Groucho Marx as he does with Buster Keaton, and poker-faced impassivity has also long been part of his style and persona—something that’s only emphasized by the paralysis in portions of his face, a consequence of a traffic accident several years ago. I rarely find Kitano as funny as I think I’m supposed to, which makes me wonder if this is because of cultural differences in how we relate to tragedy and comedy. At Locarno last summer, I saw two recent documentary features about him. One of them, Makoto Shinozaki’s Jam Session—a standard ‘‘making of’’ promo about Kikujiro, created by Kitano’s production company—was little more than advertising. The other, Jean-Pierre Limosin’s Takeshi Kitano the Unforeseeable (made for French TV), was helped immeasurably by a sensitive interview conducted by film critic (and at the time president of Tokyo University) Shigehiko Hasumi, who implicitly treats Kitano as a tragic figure. French filmmaker Chris Marker recently observed that it rains equally often in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and Akira Kurosawa. Are Eastern cultures and Russia more comfortable with gloom and tragedy? After all, in Japan suicide is still sometimes seen as a noble and satisfying way of concluding things—a kind of...

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