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Birth and death and manhood according to Takeshi Kitano, out of the darkness of an outhouse and toward the light of a kamikaze fireball. The camera rises slightly to give the besuboru sandlot its geometry, the plodding benchwarmer (Yurei Yanagi) at last hits it out of the park only to lose by outrunning the runner. "Playing in such a dusty place... What a bunch of idiots." "We're even bigger idiots for watching it." The rigidity and inanity of life's rules are understood by all, including the Yakuza ("We're gangsters, we can't go to the police"), the put-upon sloth strikes back and the caustic setup snowballs viciously. The formal severities of Violent Cop, expanded at the service of oddball gags: A cut separates the chowderhead happy astride his motorcycle and sullenly bloodied on the asphalt, a limpid snapshot of the Okinawa beachfront yields to a reverse shot of a distant figure in the bushes, who then scuttles from background to foreground to demand toilet paper. The filmmaker's own appearance midway through as a wacky underworld sodomite in debt cannily unsettles the frame's Spartan rigor—a spiraling long take paints a karaoke joint through distorting lenses, where an act of macho brutality dreamily takes place twice. (Kitano's control is such that he can turn bad timing into a sublime joke, with the uncooperative machine-gun concealed in a bouquet of flowers plucked from a Van Gogh field.) The bullet-shattered windshield that is the widescreen, the Hawksian value of ice-cream, butterfly eggs fried at the close. "Swing, or nothing will ever happen." Rinse and repeat mid-inning, Auden after all envisioned Rodin's Penseur "crouched in the position of a man at stool." With Yuriko Ishida, Taka Guadalcanal, Minoru Iizuka, Eri Fuse, and Makoto Ashikawa.
--- Fernando F. Croce |