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Hana-Bi
Takeshi Kitano, Japan, 1997, 103 mins
Review by Gerald Houghton (1998)
Yoshitaki Nishi (Takeshi Kitano) is a good man. Sure, he’s taciturn to the point of irritation and prone to bouts of the most savage violence (he stands over a dead man, still emptying his revolver), but that does not make him bad. He is very good to his wife Miyuki (Kayoko Kishimoto), who is dying of cancer. But he’s a policeman and visiting her in hospital rather than on stake-out when his partner, Horibe (a superb Ren Osugi), was shot and crippled. In the subsequent fall-out one cop was killed and another seriously wounded.
Takeshi Kitano’s seventh feature explains these events in a tapestry of elaborate, interlocking flashbacks from a future that finds Horibe in a wheelchair, abandoned by his beloved wife and daughter, and Nishi in debt to Yakuza loan sharks. Beset with guilt, he plans an ingeniously simple bank heist to pay off the gangsters and take Miyuki on a second honeymoon, and is pursued by both the police and Yakuza killers.
Writer, editor, director and star he may be, but Kitano gives himself the least lines, preferring instead to fester enigmatically behind a dark suit and impenetrable sunglasses. Not that anyone has very much to say for themselves: rumour has it Takeshi saw Hana-Bi originally with no dialogue at all. As it now comes to us we find a film of astonishing contrasts.
There are extended passages of pastoral silence, lengthy takes of calm reflection amid bursts of brutality. Kitano cuts the second half to juxtapose the losses of both Nishi and Horibe; between the latter’s naive-surreal paintings (by, inevitably, his director), and Nishi’s spraying a taxi for the robbery; between Nishi lighting fireworks for his wife, and Horibe’s firework paintings. In Japanese, Hana means flower, Bi fire: fireworks.
Stylistically the film bears comparison to 1994’s masterly Sonatine, with its vicious Yakuza gangsters hiding out at the beach. That film begins and ends in violence, but fills the interim with meditation, even comedy. Hana-Bi ups those stakes, embroidering on Sonatine’s considered lyricism, punctuating its melancholic inevitability with chopsticks through eyeballs, a rock in a towel smacked about the head: fireworks of violence.
This is a slow, demanding film requiring its audience to patiently rest a while in Nishi’s thoughts, to expand on the guilt and responsibility in his heart. Kitano is perfectly cast, expressive and touching with his wife, blank and calculating when needs must. The film resonates most when he is both, turning that temper to protect her honour. It’s in those moments that we fully understand what motivates this extraordinary man and his exemplary film.