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BY KIM MORGAN
Gonin |
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The 1996 Oxford History of World Cinema lamented, "The condition of Japanese cinema in the 1990s is still unhealthy... There is a danger that theatrical Japanese cinema may disappear altogether...the situation has become so difficult that film can no longer be produced with the creative freedom enjoyed by directors of the New Wave." But Japanese New Wave cinema is not dead. Thanks partly to the mainstream popularity of Hong Kong auteurs like John Woo and Tsui Hark, and partly to the revived interest in yakuza films--a gangster genre that flourished during the first Japanese New Wave of the '60s--Japan may well become the new hot spot for avant-garde cinema. Filmmaker and manga (adult comic book) artist Takashi Ishii and director/actor Takeshi "Beat" Kitano (Fireworks) are at the head of this promising class. The two work together in Gonin (The Five), a stylized neo-noir yakuza fable that, though rife with horrifying violence, contains a touching story about two lovers who happen to be gay. The story involves five outlaws who threaten Japan's traditional gangster establishment by concocting a heist that inevitably goes awry. Led by Bandai (Koichi Sato), a young and handsome gay disco owner who is up to his eyeballs in debt, the gang includes Jimmy (Kippei Shiina), a pimp; Hizu (Jinpachi Nezu), an ex-police officer; Ogiwara (Naoto Takenaka), a crazed businessman who has recently lost his job; and Mitsuya (Masahiro Motoki), a beautiful male prostitute who becomes Bandai's lover. The five succeed in getting the money, but they don't get away with it. Stalked by a pair of hit men (Kitano and Kazuya Kimura, who also play gay lovers) hired by the yakuza, the five systematically meet their fate through acts of violence that are so personally brutal that the characters become expressionistic figures: desperate men in desperate love who must search their souls as their souls leave their bodies. While the picture is gorgeously atmospheric in standard neo-noir fashion, with blue and red neon lights, rain-washed urban streets and subterranean disco joints, it's also intensely modern. The eye-popping, blood-drenched cinematography is garishly beautiful, like the artwork of a comic book. Gonin is also clearly referential. In style and in substance, Gonin reveals influences ranging from Scorsese's Mean Streets to Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns (which were influenced by Japanese master). And like French New Wave director Jean-Pierre Melville's seminal Le Samourai (John Woo's favorite film), Gonin has a detached iciness that makes the gunfire all the more shocking and laconic characters who are mysterious, confusing and even psychopathic, but who become sympathetic and symbolic of something more than just violent killers. Even more emblematic of Gonin's brilliance is Kitano's expressionless hit man. Wearing a gray suit and a gauze patch over one eye, Kitano is so precise, so clean and so indestructible that we don't want him to be destroyed even though he's a Terminator-like monster. Representing the self-created nightmare from which one cannot escape, he is the cruel gun of fate, the apocalyptic horseman that one pretends doesn't exist. Thankfully, however, Kitano does exist, as does Ishii. Their dark cinematic worlds are the beacons of light guiding Japanese cinema out of oblivion.
originally published September 9, 1998 |
