Fireworks (Takeshi Kitano, 1997)

Takeshi Kitano in Fireworks

Cast: Takeshi Kitano, Kayoko Kishimoto, Ren Osugi, Susumu Terajima, Tetsu Watanabe, Hakuryu, Yasuei Yakushiji, Taro Itsumi, Ken'ichi Yajima, Makoto Ashikawa, Yuko Daike. Screenplay: Takeshi Kitano. Cinematography: Hideo Yamamoto. Art direction: Norihiro Isoda. Film editing: Takeshi Kitano, Yoshinori Ohta. Music: Joe Hisaishi.

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.

Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku, 2000)

Yuko Miyamura in Battle Royale

Shuya Nanahara: Tatsuya Fujiwara
Noriko Nakagawa: Aki Maeda
Kitano: Takeshi Kitano
Shogo Kawada: Taro Yamamoto
Kazuo Kiriyama: Masanobu Ando
Mitsuko Souma: Kou Shibasaki
Takako Chigusa: Chiaki Kuriyama
Shinji Mimura: Takashi Tsukamoto
Hiroki Tsugimura: Sosuke Takaoka
Yukie Utsumi: Eri Ishikawa
Yuko Sakaki: Hitomi Hyuga
Training Video Girl: Yuko Miyamura

Director: Kinji Fukasaku
Screenplay: Kenta Fukasaku
Based on a novel by Koushun Takami
Cinematography: Katsumi Yanagijima
Production design: Kyoko Heya
Film editing: Hirohide Abe

In my brief and admittedly superficial exploration of Japanese cinema, I have often been struck by how postwar filmmakers take a rather harsh attitude toward the generation born after World War II. Even so hip a director as Nagisa Oshima paints a rather jaundiced picture of wayward teenagers in films like Cruel Story of Youth (1960), though suggesting that American influence at least helped push Japanese young people into delinquency. Masahiro Shinoda's Youth in Fury, made the same year as Oshima's film, focuses on the student riots against the Japanese-American mutual security treaty, suggesting that the political impotence of the young is to blame. An older filmmaker like Keisuke Kinshita, in The Young Rebels (1980), blamed the rebelliousness on parents, a familiar scapegoat. And then there's Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale, which subjects the problem of turbulent youth to what we might call a final solution: mutual extermination. In an era plagued by depression and unemployment, the government passes a population-control law: Each year, a middle school class is chosen and sent to a remote island where they are forced to fight to the death. If you're thinking this sounds a lot like The Hunger Games, have another drink. In fact, Suzanne Collins, the author of The Hunger Games trilogy, the first book of which appeared in 2008, has said that she never saw the film or read the 1999 novel by Koushun Takami on which it was based. Her claim is plausible: Battle Royale stirred up so much controversy in Japan over its violence that it wasn't released theatrically in the United States until 2011, partly because American distributors were scared off by memories of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre. Fukasaku's film is in fact like a bloodier, more barebones version of The Hunger Games movies (Gary Ross, 2012; Francis Lawrence, 2013, 2014, 2015). It's also funnier and scarier because it has been shorn of the Olympic Games-style spectacle of  the American movies. Instead, we get a "training video" in which a ditzy instructor, a parody of Japanese game show hosts, explains the rules: Each player gets a bag of supplies that includes a "weapon" -- ranging from a semiautomatic rifle to a paper fan -- and they are all fitted with monitoring collars that will explode if they try to remove them, as well as if the game ends on the third day with more than one survivor. The film, written by the director's son, Kenta Fukasaku, doesn't waste a lot of time on character development, except for two principal combatants, Shuya and Noriko, who fall in love along the way. There are also a trio of villains: Mitsuko, who relishes the thought of killing her classmates, and a ringer, a "transfer student" named Kazuo Kirayama, who is really a psychopath brought in by the sadistic director of the game, the schoolteacher Kitano, to spice things up. There's another supposed transfer student, Shogo Kawada, who is actually a survivor of an earlier game, but he turns out to be a good guy, seeking revenge on Kitano for his girlfriend's death in that game. Aside from these characters, most of the players are nondescript, except for the computer geek, Shinji Mimura, who manages both to hack into the game's system and to construct a bomb he plans to use to take out the game headquarters. There is much vivid killing in the film, but it's paced so fast, and the characters are mostly so undefined that, except for the fact that these are kids killing kids, it's easy to get caught up in it all. It's not surprising that it's one of Quentin Tarantino's favorite movies.