Title: Hana-bi aka Fireworks
Genre: Drama/Action
Director: Kitano Takeshi
Format: Movie, 98 minutes.
Dates: 3 Sep 1997

Synopsis: Nishi and Horibe are detectives who have known each other since school and have been partners on the police force for years.  Horibe is happily married, while Nishi’s wife is suffering from leukemia, the same disease that took their young daughter years ago.  After Horibe is shot during a stake-out, he is confined to a wheelchair, and his wife leaves him.  Meanwhile, Nishi quits the force, and must find a way to pay off a large debt he has with the yakuza, which he took out to care for his ailing wife.

The Highlights
Tone: Generally serene tone is only interrupted by explosions of stylize violence.
Action: Calling it “action” is almost demeaning; beautifully executed moments of violence come without warning and disappear just as suddenly.
Dialogue: Minimal.
Characters: Complex, yet also minimal; a case study of the different ways people “cope”.
Artworks: An interesting addition; beautiful yet increasingly grim as the film goes on.
Directing: Inspired; Kitano makes this film his own.
Music: Hisaishi Joe’s soundtrack is emotive and atmospheric; beautiful.

I find Kitano Takeshi, the person, just as fascinating as this film, and after you see Hana-bi for yourself, you’ll understand why this is a big statement.  This is only the second Kitano film I’ve seen, the first being his attempt to break into the American markets, Brother, and while I liked what I saw from that film, this just blows it out of the water.  What becomes clear while watching Hana-bi is that Kitano has the soul of an artist.  It’s amazing to think that this was a man who started out as a manzai comedian (hence the stage name “Beat Takeshi”) and achieved fame with the slapstick comedy series Takeshi’s Castle.  His ’90s crime films, Hana-bi among the most highly regarded, are a massive departure from his slapstick roots, and it’s not just because they’re marked with a morbid sense of sentimentalism mixed with unsettling explosions of stylized violence, because if that was all there was to Hana-bi, I wouldn’t have so much praise for it.  This is a film that’s tender, subtle, intricate, complex and personal… an achievement of minimalist storytelling and stylized violence.

Hana-bi is minimalist to an extreme.  The dialogue is sparse and curt, occurring just enough to establish the skeleton of the plot.  Kitano instead lets the characters’ actions do the talking.  He limits the story’s focus to just two characters, but explores them thoroughly, painting portraits of people who are complex and tortured.  Hana-bi’s main character, Nishi, played by Kitano himself, exhibits a normally impassive demeanor which snaps suddenly when he is driven to violence by his sentimentalism, while Horibe, played by Osugi Ren, struggles to come to grips with the emptiness of a life after work, abandoned by his wife, and living with a disability.  The lives of these men are initially intertwined, but the separate directions their respective stories take over the course of the film are starkly different, highlighting a contrast between the different ways these characters deal with tumultuous situations devoid of meaning or reason, in that, one merely copes, while the other lashes out.

The execution of the stylized violence is superb.  It happens as part of a dichotomy, suddenly interrupting the otherwise serene mood before subsiding in a matter of seconds.  It can only be described as “explosive”, apt given the film’s title, and it’s always unsettling because of its suddenness.  Characters will sit down to talk when, without warning, one will stab another’s eye out with a chopstick.  When gunplay is involved, the blood flows out thick and plentiful, showing that Kitano’s not mucking around with his portrayal of violence.  The violent actions are unsettling by design, and further show the disturbed nature of the characters, such as the numerous times characters will shoot at each other with unloaded guns (which is symbolic given one of the events in the story).

Art becomes an integral component of the film as Horibe resorts to painting as an outlet, an ironic parallel given that Kitano also turned to painting while recovering from a near-fatal motorcycle accident in 1994.  All of the pointillist paintings featured in Hana-bi are, in fact, Kitano’s own, which I found an amazing display of his multiple talents.  These are works of beauty, but as the film progresses, they become grimmer and more chilling, the final artwork to appear on screen featuring a motif of the Japanese characters for “snow”, “light” and “suicide”.

Hisaishi Joe, renowned among Ghibli fans, supplies the soundtrack: melodic, melancholic, tense and emotive, it’s every bit as beautiful as is required to fit the film.  My few criticisms of this film are minor: Nishi’s wife plays an important part in the plot but is a completely undeveloped character, and there are moments of strange tension between her and Nishi that didn’t make sense to me.  Also, the acting isn’t quite what I’d consider “first class”, even though almost every other part of the film, from music to cinematography to directing, basically is.

The Rating: 9

Reviewed by: Sorrow-kun