|
 akeshi
Kitano is
Japan
's true 'King of All Media.' A cultural icon in
his home country as an actor, director, poet,
comedian, painter and newspaper journalist, Kitano
is best known to the rest of the world as a
minimalist craftsman of gritty, nihilistic
gangster films. In "Blood and Bones,"
Kitano steps in front of the camera under the
direction of someone other than himself for the
first time in nearly a decade, and gives a career
affirming performance as one of the most unlikable
characters ever seen on screen.
Kitano
plays Shunpei Kim, a Korean immigrant who comes to
Osaka
,
Japan
in 1920 as a teenager. Working at a fish paste
roll store, Kim claws his way out of poverty to
become a father and leader in the immigrant
community where he lives. But this is not the
heart warming story of the downtrodden pulling
themselves up by their bootstraps. What we see
very quickly is that Kim is a thoroughly
malevolent brute who secures his position as
community leader not through benevolence and
accommodation, but by violence and intimidation.
The
very first scene of "Blood and Bones"
shows Kim brutally beating and raping his wife in
front of his children. He cheats on his wife
flagrantly, keeping his mistress in a house down
the street and bringing her into his 'family'
after he inevitably knocks her up. He comes home
drunk late at night swinging a hatchet about the
house and beats his children, even throwing his
daughter down a flight of stairs. At his fish roll
factory, Kim keeps his employees in line through
similar acts of intimidation. When one of his
employees asks for overtime pay, Kim responds by
burning his face with a hot coal. As his business
grows, Kim expands his enterprise to loan
sharking, grimly prowling the neighborhood
carrying a big stick and mercilessly flogging all
who owe him money.
Based on a semi-autobiographic novel by
Korean-Japanese author Yang Sok Gil, "Blood
and Bones" has a sprawling, epic scope with a
feel similar to a Bernardo Bertolucci film.
"Blood and Bones" covers six decades and
runs nearly two and a half hours, and can't be
described as anything but epic. And yet, despite
the grand scope, director Yoichi Sai manages to
give "Blood and Bones" a closed and
almost claustrophobic feel. He achieves this by
keeping the story anchored to one immigrant
community; in fact, one street.
As
the story progresses through the decades, we see
Kim's family grow, and his sons, daughters and
mistresses have children of their own. But few
leave the neighborhood and soon Kim's extended
family all but occupies the entire street. Not by
choice, mind you, but by the sheer force of Kim's
will. The years of terrorizing both his family and
his neighbors have created a pervasive sense of
hopelessness and self-imposed isolation amongst
everyone around Kim. Their spirits have been so
thoroughly broken by Kim's abuse that the thought
of simply leaving never occurs to them. As the
decades roll by, nothing seems to ever change,
with only passing planes or a new car signifying
that time has, in fact, passed.
Although "Blood and Bones" is constructed as
a character study, it's really just a backdrop for
a smoldering performance by Kitano, with the rest
of the cast simply fading into the background as
Kitano unleashes a career's worth of fury on the
audience. Director Sai waited six years to cast
Kitano in the role, knowing he'd be the perfect
actor to play Kim. And it's no surprise, really.
When you boil the character down to its essence,
Kim is like all the characters Kitano has ever
played, with the exception of an emotional vacuum
in Kim that is not a characteristic of Kitano's
other characters.
The
nearest parallel to Kitano's Kim is Nishi in
"Hana Bi," a man who swings between
extreme love and extreme anger and takes out these
emotions on the people around him. But unlike
Nishi, Kim is a man completely incapable of love
or tenderness, and knows only anger and violence.
And unfortunately that's the movie's greatest
shortcoming. We get almost no insight into why Kim
is the way that he is, with the exception of some
nasty looking scars on his back, indicating that
Kim may have been the victim of some sort of abuse
or persecution in
Korea
. As a result, the audience has little chance of
understanding or sympathizing with Kim.
And
outside of Kim, there's precious little else to
"Blood and Bones". In the first decade,
Kim beats people up and has a mistress. In decade
two, Kim is still beating people up and has
another mistress. And so on. The only wrinkles to
the story come in the form of the various
calamities that befall Kim's family, but after a
while there's only so much heartache the audience
can take. The fact that Kim remains an intriguing
figure throughout the film is a testament to the
power and intensity of Kitano's performance, but
unfortunately that's not quite enough for a film
this long. |
