Fireworks (Hana-bi): Kitano's Violent Elegy

The title is a joke that stops being funny about halfway through the film. Hana-bi is the ordinary Japanese word for fireworks, and Takeshi Kitano writes it with a hyphen so you cannot avoid seeing its parts: hana, flower, and bi, fire. Beauty and destruction, welded into a single noun that Japanese speakers use without thinking about it, the way English speakers say “bittersweet” without tasting either half. Kitano builds a whole film in the seam.

Fireworks won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1997, which was the moment the international festival circuit collectively decided that the man who had been Japan’s most famous television comedian was also one of the serious filmmakers of the era. In Japan the news landed strangely. Kitano was Beat Takeshi — a manzai comic, half of a legendary double act, a fixture of variety television so ubiquitous that his countrymen found the idea of him as an art-film laureate faintly absurd. He has never fully resolved that split. He still bills himself as Beat Takeshi when he acts and Takeshi Kitano when he directs, which is either a business arrangement or the most honest credit sequence in cinema.

The setup

Kitano plays Nishi, a detective. He is a small, still, sullen man who says almost nothing and has, when he chooses to use it, an appalling capacity for violence. Three things have happened to him. His wife (Kayoko Kishimoto) is dying — leukaemia, terminal, the doctors are finished pretending. His partner Horibe (Ren Osugi) has been shot and left paralysed, and has subsequently been left by his family. And a stakeout has gone wrong in a way that Nishi holds himself responsible for.

He also owes money to yakuza loan sharks, who visit him at intervals throughout the film in the manner of a weather system. Nishi has no plan that he shares with anyone. He resigns. He acquires a taxi. He takes his wife on a trip.

That is deliberately most of what I will tell you, because the film’s construction depends on the order in which it hands you information, and it does not hand it to you in order.

The edit is the film

Kitano edits his own pictures, and Fireworks is the clearest demonstration anywhere of what that gets him. The film moves between past and present with no signal at all — no dissolve, no caption, no music cue, no helpful lighting change. A scene simply becomes another scene, and you work out afterwards which one you were in.

This sounds like a puzzle-box gimmick and it operates as something far more specific: it is a model of how grief actually indexes memory. Nishi remembers out of sequence. He is being ambushed by the past mid-sentence, and Kitano gives the audience the ambush rather than a description of the ambush. By the time the film has taught you its grammar, you are flinching at cuts.

The violence works on the same principle, inverted. Kitano’s rule — and it is consistent across his crime films — is that violence arrives without an approach shot. There is no reaction beat, no menacing build, no score swelling to warn you. A conversation is happening. A conversation stops happening. Somebody is on the floor and it took a third of a second. Then the film returns to the same flat, patient stillness it had before, as if nothing has been added to the world.

The effect is genuinely unpleasant in a way that choreographed screen violence never manages, and the mechanism is simple: Kitano removes the audience’s preparation time. Most films let you brace. He does not, so your body registers each burst as an accident rather than a set-piece. It is the same trick a car crash plays.

The paintings

Horibe, immobilised and abandoned, starts painting. The canvases fill the film’s back half — flowers made of animals, animals made of flowers, thick and childlike and strange, images that a critic would call naive if they were not so plainly the work of somebody trying to reassemble a mind.

Kitano painted them. In August 1994 he crashed a scooter in Tokyo and nearly died; the injuries left him with lasting partial paralysis on one side of his face. He took up painting during the recovery. The pictures on Horibe’s wall are the pictures Kitano made while learning to live inside a face that no longer entirely obeyed him, and he put them into a film about a man learning to live inside a body that no longer obeys him.

That is an unusually direct piece of self-exposure from a director whose entire style is refusal. Kitano gives Nishi almost no dialogue and no visible interiority — the performance is a closed door — and then he hangs his own convalescence on the wall of the subplot and lets you look at it for as long as you like. Everything the star will not say, the paintings say. It is a genuinely radical division of labour, and it is why the film is moving rather than merely austere.

Joe Hisaishi’s score does the rest. Hisaishi is best known for Miyazaki, and he writes for Kitano the same way he writes for animation — melodically, unashamedly, with a directness that sits at right angles to everything on screen. The music is doing the weeping so the actors do not have to.

The ancestor

The obvious lineage is Jean-Pierre Melville, and that reading holds up. The truer ancestor of Fireworks is Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au grisbi from 1954 — the film that worked out that the interesting part of a criminal’s life is the fatigue. Becker gave Jean Gabin a heist plot and then spent the running time on a tired man making a sandwich for a friend. Kitano is doing the identical thing forty-three years later: the crime is real, the crime is competent, and the crime is a pretext for watching somebody’s affection for one other person survive their circumstances.

The Anglophone branch of that family is The Friends of Eddie Coyle, where the mob is a bad job with poor conditions, and the minimalist branch runs through Murder by Contract, which stripped the hit-man film down to a man with a schedule. Kitano’s own nearest neighbour in the present tense is Korean — Night in Paradise is essentially a Kitano film with better weather, and the debt is worn openly.

Within Kitano, Fireworks is the third point of a triangle with Sonatine and Boiling Point. Same beach, same stillness, same sudden gunfire. Fireworks is the one where he finally admits what the beach was always for.

The case against

Kitano’s stillness is a technique with a failure mode, and Fireworks touches it. There are stretches — particularly in the middle third, on the road — where the withholding stops generating tension and simply generates absence. A viewer unsympathetic to the method will call several sequences empty, and I do not think they are entirely wrong; some of the silence is meaning and some of it is just quiet.

The wife is the film’s real problem. Kishimoto is extraordinary within the space she is given, and the space is small: she is almost mute, almost weightless, a woman defined entirely by her dying and her husband’s response to it. The film’s emotional economy runs on her, and she is never permitted a want of her own. You can argue this is the point — Nishi cannot see her either, and that is his tragedy — but the argument does the film’s work for it.

And the yakuza subplot is machinery. The loan sharks exist to apply pressure and to be dealt with, and every scene they appear in is the film changing gear rather than the film thinking.

The verdict

What makes Fireworks endure is the same thing that makes it hard to talk about: Kitano refuses to translate it. He hands you a man who will not explain himself, a wife who cannot, a paralysed friend who paints instead of speaking, and a director whose face was rebuilt by surgeons and who declines to mention it. Everything is displaced onto surfaces — a canvas, a stolen car, a flat cut, a beach in winter. The film asks you to read the surfaces, and it never once checks whether you managed.

It is Kitano’s best film, and I think it is the best crime film of the 1990s, because it understands that the elegy and the eruption come from the same place. Flower and fire; the word already knew. Disc editions circulate widely and it plays regularly in Kitano repertory runs — see it in a room where nobody can talk.

Spoilers below

Nishi robs a bank. He does it by repainting a taxi as a police car, walking in dressed as what he recently was, and taking the money with the flat competence of a man doing paperwork. He clears his debt to the loan sharks. He sends money to the widow of the dead colleague. He buys Horibe his paints. Then he takes his wife on the journey we have been watching in fragments all along — snow, temples, a beach, playing cards, a firework — and the trip is revealed to be what it has been from the first frame: a long goodbye that only one of them is fully attending.

The final sequence is on the beach. The police arrive. Nishi asks for a moment. There is a cut away to the sea, and a child, and two gunshots off-screen.

Kitano’s decision to place the camera elsewhere for the only violence in the film that matters to him is the whole argument in one move. He has spent ninety minutes showing you savagery without warning and without ceremony, insisting that violence is banal and instantaneous and beneath commentary. And then, when it is his own, he looks away. The one act he will not put on screen is the one act that was chosen with love. It is the most restrained thing in a career built on restraint, and it is devastating precisely because he had earned the right to show it and declined.