Boiling Point: Kitano's Deadpan Baseball-and-Yakuza Debut

The Japanese title is 3-4x jūgatsu, which reads as a baseball scoreline: three to four, in October. The “x” is the notation that marks a walk-off — the home team wins in the bottom of the final innings and the rest of the innings is never played, so the box score carries a little cross where the remaining numbers should be. A game that ends before it finishes. Somebody thought hard about that title, and the English distributors, faced with a joke that survives no translation at all, called it Boiling Point and moved on.

This was Takeshi Kitano’s second film and his first as writer-director. The debut, Violent Cop in 1989, had come to him by accident: Kinji Fukasaku was set to direct it and dropped out, and the studio handed the picture to its television-comedian star on the theory that he could hardly make it worse. He rewrote it on the floor and made something that looked like nothing else in Japanese cinema. Boiling Point is the film where he did it on purpose.

The setup

Masaki (Yurei Yanagi) works at a petrol station and plays for an amateur baseball team so bad that its games have the quality of a wake. He is slow, sullen and almost entirely without affect — one of those young men who processes the world with a delay of about four seconds and has learned to keep his face still while he catches up.

At the station he manages to offend a yakuza. It is a nothing incident, handled badly, and it grows. His coach, Iguchi, turns out to have a history with these people and attempts to smooth it over, which makes it worse. The situation acquires a momentum that nobody in it wants and nobody in it can stop, and Masaki concludes, with the terrible literal-mindedness of the very stupid or the very brave, that what he needs is a gun.

So he and his friend Kazuo fly to Okinawa to buy one. And on Okinawa they meet Uehara.

Kitano arrives forty minutes late

Uehara is played by Kitano, and he does not appear until the film is well underway. This is the single most interesting decision in the picture and the one that tells you Kitano already knew exactly what he was doing.

By 1990 Beat Takeshi was the most recognisable man in Japan — a manzai comic, a television fixture, a presence so total that his face functioned as furniture. Every commercial instinct says you put that face in the first shot. Kitano instead spends forty minutes on a nobody at a petrol station, lets the audience settle into a low-grade, near-plotless comedy of provincial embarrassment, and then walks a monster into it.

Uehara is a yakuza who has been thrown out of his own organisation, which in this world means he has lost the only thing that was regulating him. He is charming for approximately eight seconds at a time. He is violent without warning, without proportion and without subsequent interest in what he has done. And he is genuinely, deliberately vile — Kitano writes himself a sexual sadist who humiliates his own subordinate, and films it flatly, with the same bored patience he gives to a car park.

The casting is the joke and the knife. Japan’s most beloved comedian, arriving late, to be the worst thing in the film. Kitano has never done anything more aggressive to his own audience, and he did it in his first script.

Why it works

The grammar is already fully formed here, which is startling in a second film. Kitano’s camera is static, frontal and too far away. Scenes are held past the point where the information has been delivered. There is almost no score — long passages play in ambient sound, which strips the film of the emotional handrail that even the coldest crime pictures leave in place.

And the violence works the way it works in Sonatine and Fireworks, because the technique was there from the beginning: no approach shot, no reaction shot. A wide, flat, patient frame of people doing nothing. A sudden act. The same wide, flat, patient frame afterwards, with one item rearranged. The audience is never allowed to brace, so the body reads each incident as an accident, and because the film never gets excited about any of it, the accumulation is exhausting rather than thrilling.

The comedy runs on the identical mechanism, which is the discovery Kitano made here and spent the next twenty years developing. A joke and a beating are both things that arrive in a held shot without preparation. Kitano cuts them the same way. So you stop being able to tell, in advance, which one is coming — and after an hour you are laughing with your shoulders up, which is a physical state very few films can produce.

The baseball is doing structural work too. A bad amateur team is a machine for generating dead time: standing about, waiting for something to be hit at you, occasionally failing in public. Kitano frames the underworld exactly the same way. Masaki is fielding in both halves of his life.

The ancestor

The forebear here is Kinji Fukasaku, and the connection is literal — Fukasaku was to have made Kitano’s debut, and Kitano got the job when he left. In 1973 Fukasaku had detonated the Japanese gangster film with Battles Without Honour and Humanity, the first of the jitsuroku or “true record” yakuza pictures, which threw out the honourable outlaw of the studio era and replaced him with rabid opportunists knifing each other over nothing in a shaking handheld frame. Uehara is a Fukasaku creature. He has no code, no plan and no ceiling.

What Kitano changes is the temperature. Fukasaku filmed chaos with a chaotic camera, and the effect is a riot. Kitano films the identical animal with a tripod, a long lens and no music, and the effect is a documentary about a car crash. Same diagnosis, opposite bedside manner.

Behind Fukasaku is Seijun Suzuki, who worked out in the 1960s that the professional criminal is fundamentally an absurd figure — see Branded to Kill, which cost him his career, and Youth of the Beast, where the yakuza run their office behind a cinema screen. The Japanese crime film has been laughing at itself for sixty years. Kitano is the one who stopped smiling while he did it.

The case against

Boiling Point is his roughest good film, and the roughness is not all intentional. The first act is genuinely slack — the petrol-station material establishes its point early and then keeps establishing it, and Yanagi’s blankness, which is the correct performance, gives the camera very little to hold. Forty minutes is a long time to wait for a film to start, however well the wait pays off.

The tonal management in the Okinawa section is a problem I have never fully resolved. Kitano’s insistence on filming Uehara’s sexual cruelty with the same flat detachment he gives to a joke is a real position and a defensible one — it refuses the audience any comfortable place to stand. It also means the film’s most disturbing content is delivered in the register of a gag, and a viewer who reads it as one is not making an error the film has guarded against.

And the picture is visibly a second film. Compositions repeat. Scenes end because they have finished rather than because they have arrived somewhere. The control that makes Sonatine feel inevitable is here an intention rather than an achievement.

The verdict

The thing worth seeing Boiling Point for is the sensation of watching a director find his entire method in public, at speed, with the confidence to spend his own stardom on a bad idea. Every Kitano signature is present: the static wide, the missing score, the violence arriving with no runway, the eruption of a beloved face into unforgivable behaviour, the flat comedy of men with nothing to do. The film cannot yet make them cohere. Three years later it would, on a beach in Okinawa, in the same director’s best film.

Take it as the rough sketch it is. There is a specific pleasure in seeing a great filmmaker’s tools before he has learned which one to use when, and Boiling Point has the additional advantage of being funnier than anything else he made. Disc editions circulate; it plays in Kitano retrospectives, generally third on the bill. That is roughly where it belongs, and third on this bill is still worth the ticket.

Spoilers below

Uehara’s rampage consumes everything around it, including Uehara. The man has removed every restraint he ever had, and the organisation he was thrown out of eventually does the arithmetic. He is used up rather than defeated, which is Fukasaku’s ending, arrived at without any of Fukasaku’s noise.

Masaki goes home with the gun and does the thing the film has been quietly promising. He takes a petrol tanker, drives it into the yakuza office, and destroys them, himself included. It is the only big spectacle in the picture, and Kitano films it almost dismissively.

Then he cuts to the baseball diamond, and Masaki is standing there, unharmed, emerging from the portable lavatory at the edge of the pitch where the film’s very first shot found him.

The standard reading is that none of it happened — that the whole film is a daydream in a plastic cubicle, four seconds of a slow man’s fantasy while his terrible team loses another game. I think that reading is available and I think Kitano refuses to confirm it, and the refusal is the point. What the ending actually does is return the scoreline of the title: the game is over, decided in the bottom of the innings, and the remaining plays were never made. Masaki’s revenge exists in the box score as a little cross where the numbers should be.

Kitano’s second film ends by cancelling itself, which is either a rookie’s shrug or the most ruthless joke in his filmography. Given what he did next, I know which way I would bet.