Takeshis'

by Ari

Takeshi Kitano’s intriguing body of work has been electrifying audiences worldwide for almost twenty years now. Noted for his subtle, poetic sensibilities and explosive, brutal violence, his movies somehow convey fatalistic thematic content with eloquence and beauty. Seminal works such as Fireworks and Sonatine demonstrate his meditative style and gritty realism. Kitano has become much more experimental in recent years with unusual, sometimes bizarre films like his melancholy drama, Dolls, or his high-spirited Zatoichi remake. It seems that many Japanese filmmakers have a fascination with disjointed, barely coherent narrative structure these days, and Kitano’s confounding new film, Takeshis’, is very much in line with Miike’s Izo or Ishii’s Funky Forest. Because Kitano has proven to be such a pivotal voice in contemporary Japanese film, his nonsensical ideas are particularly dreadful. This is easily his most experimental work yet, but it also happens to be his absolute worst. As I stated in my less than favorable review of Funky Forest, bizarre for the sake of bizarre is nothing but irritating. Once Takeshis' reaches full-blown lunacy (about 10 minutes in), the only thing it becomes is a test of patience.

Searching for a real thematic idea in Takeshis’ is wasting precious time, but I believe Kitano was attempting a satirical comedy based on his own international celebrity and artistic integrity. Takeshis' is neither funny, nor moving, but the ambition of successfully satirizing his own ego seems to be his ultimate aim. He does this by focusing the story on a struggling actor named Kitano, a dull and miserable mope who happens to be the identical twin of his favorite star, the real “Beat” Takeshi Kitano. The movie star supposedly represents shallow celebrity, while the struggling actor represents the dreamer and artist. Whatever. These characters have about as much insight into Kitano’s sensibilities as Double Impact did for Jean Claude Van Damme’s. On second thought, maybe even less. The majority of the film is spent with prolonged, mostly unbearable dream sequences that obviously have no structure or relevance. These sequences allow him to constantly reference his other movies, while assaulting you with outrageous images and scenes of spectacular violence, sex, or whatever else that approaches the sign of complete mental instability.

This is Kitano's most embarrassingly shot and edited feature, the work of a pompous amateur with nothing important to express. Why an accomplished artist would reduce himself to such empty-headed lows is beyond me. His idea of humor in this film is having a character jokingly refer to Gregory Peck as Gregory Punk, Katherine Hepburn as Katherine Heartburn, and Humphrey Bogart as Humphrey Avocado. Idiocy at its most insulting and intolerable. This boredom is mixed with sequences of useless violence that neither entertains, nor provokes. Kitano dreams of killing people without remorse, acting the cold-blooded Yakuza he’s best known for playing. Pointless? In every way.

In my Coming Soon article, I said this about Takeshis’: “Has the potential to be something special.  Takeshi Kitano is still the best and most consistent Japanese filmmaker working today”.

How wrong I was.