In the Flesh: Gonin

Five losers, buried in debt after the collapse of Japan’s economic bubble in the 1990s, decide to rob the Yakuza. You’d be hard-pressed to think up a more shopworn plot, but Takashi Ishii’s Gonin isn’t interested in story so much as it is in the feeling of failure and the cultivation of an atmosphere of tragic doom against the most banal backdrop imaginable. Its characters aren’t fighting to save anything, really. Their minds and bodies are already broken, their worlds already over, their loves already lost. By the time we meet him, Mikihiko Bandai (Kōichi Satō) is already a has-been minor pop star managing a disco that’s been circling the drain for years. Gay hustler Junichi (Masahiro Motoki) is a struggling alcoholic, salaryman Shohei Ogiwara (Naoto Takenaka) an unhinged and violent shell — the poorly planned heist is as much a group suicide attempt as it is an attempt to make anything better for any of the film’s core cast.

Ishii situates the heist strategically in the film’s dead center, squeezing the chaotic, looping energy of its first half with merciless force until it is transmuted into an entirely different kind of movie. A sense of desolation takes hold as hitmen Ichiro (Takeshi Kitano) and Kazuma (Kazuya Kimura) step into the picture, hired by the Yakuza to exact bloody vengeance on the crew. There are shades of Jules Dassin’s Rififi all over Gonin, from its structure to its slightly curdled sense of romance, though Gonin’s ending is an even bleaker portrait of mutually assured destruction than Rififi’s. The heartbreaking last kiss between the dying, semi-closeted Bandai and his sometimes lover Junichi, set with acidic humor in a public restroom, is among cinema’s most bittersweet, while Junichi and Ichiro’s anticlimactic final confrontation reaffirms that in the film’s criminal underworld everyone has been headed to the same gray, lightless place since its very first moments.

Kitano anchors the film as the unflappable Ichiro, one eye obscured by a square of medical gauze. He enters suddenly and without fanfare and leaves the same way, dying slowly, unnoticed, in the back of a bus. There is a kind of poetry to it. Junichi’s blood dripping on the box holding Bandai’s ashes. Ichiro’s last world-weary sigh. An earlier scene in which he surprises Junichi and another heist member in the midst of a clumsy attempt at exacting revenge on the Yakuza and faces them down without expression, never letting go of his translucent plastic umbrella, feels like a perfect encapsulation of the film’s slightly absurdist viciousness. That Gonin achieves all this tonal modulation atop jaw-dropping lighting and incredible depth of field only heightens the impression that we’re watching master craftsmen at work. Any one of the film’s alleyway shots or strange, austere interiors can withstand minutes of admiring close inspection. Everything is out of place, but nothing’s wasted, and nothing’s unintentional.