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| Takeshi Kitano in Fireworks |
Perhaps a film about a rogue cop like Fireworks is not the most appropriate thing to be watching in these days of protest against police brutality. It certainly doesn't skimp on bloody violence and a disregard for rule by law as its protagonist, Nishi (Takeshi Kitano, who also wrote, directed, edited, and painted the pictures featured in the film), kills and robs his way toward vengeance for the wrongs done to him and his fellow policemen. As an actor, Kitano channels such taciturn vessels of wrath as Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood in his "Dirty Harry" phase. But it's so often also such a beautifully photographed and sensitively crafted film that I can't help feeling that it transcends its baser moments and motives. Nishi has got himself deep in debt to a yakuza loan shark to pay the medical bills for his wife, who has terminal leukemia. Moreover, their young daughter has recently died, and he has left the police force after one of his colleagues was killed and two others seriously wounded in a shootout. He finds an unscrupulous junkyard owner who sells him an old taxicab and a police car rooftop light bar, paints the cab to look like a cop car, puts on a police uniform, and robs a bank -- eluding the cops called to the scene of the robbery with this disguise. He pays off the yakuza and takes his wife away on a vacation. But he is tracked down by both the yakuza, who claim he still owes them interest on the money he borrowed, and two of his fellow officers. He guns down the yakuza, but when the two policemen arrive, he and his wife are on a secluded beach. Nishi loads two bullets into his revolver, and as the film ends we hear two shots. We're left to decide whether the shots were fired at the cops as they close in or if Nishi has killed his wife and himself, but the film has tilted us so far in the direction of believing him to be an honorable man driven to the limits by painful experience that only the latter conclusion makes thematic and emotional sense. Integrated with Nishi's story is that of Horibe, his fellow officer who was wounded in the shootout and is now confined to a wheelchair. His wife has left him, and Horibe tries to fill his days by painting pictures, some of which blend flowers and animals and some of pointillist-style scenes. The last picture we see Horibe painting is of snow falling in darkness and the word "suicide" inscribed on it. But once again, Kitano, who actually painted the pictures, gives us no clear resolution: Does the word refer to Horibe's intention or to Nishi's? The ambiguities of Fireworks sit oddly with the more conventionally staged movie violence of the film, but it's clearly the work of a gifted filmmaker.
