I Would Like to See It: Hana-Bi

Why water dead flowers? Why fly a kite without wings? Hana-bi, Takeshi Kitano’s 1997 Yakuza film, concerns itself largely with the beauty of caring for things that we’ve already lost. Kitano’s movie is structured around absences, from the specter of ex-cop Yoshitaka Nishi (Kitano) and his wife Miyuki’s (Kayoko Kishimoto) dead daughter to the empty tricycle in the front hall of their apartment building, the titular fireworks tube with its long-delayed discharge, and a thousand other images of emptiness and alienation both great and small. It does so with Kitano’s typical visual genius. A vast and empty sweep of sand, the ocean hissing over it where the tide line turns it dark. Kitano’s weatherbeaten face framed by apartment towers and the blank blue sky. A feral cat walking past the open gates of a Buddhist temple. Desolation in the midst of beauty. Scenes of banal absurdity like Nishi kicking a young punk off the hood of his car framed as thoughtfully as Gentileschi’s Judith and Holofernes.

Hana-bi’s story is simple: Nishi, deep in hock to the Yakuza for Miyuki’s leukemia treatments, robs a bank to pay said loans, then takes off on one last vacation with his wife. Every step of the way unfolds with slow and patient beauty. He meticulously repaints a cab to look like a police cruiser. He stages movie history’s quietest stickup, melancholy radiating from his every movement as he holds a fake gun on his bank teller. His and Miyuki’s escape to the countryside and then to the shore recalls the transcendent joys of his earlier film Sonatine, drawing divinity out of scenes of schoolkid transgression and pranksterism. Ringing an unattended temple bell moments after a genial grandfather explains to his granddaughter that they’ll have to wait to hear it. Wrecking a zen garden to retrieve a single rock. Violence intrudes, but one senses without words that this is understood by both Nishi and Miyuki as inevitable.

One scene in particular stands out. Tracked down by his former Yakuza bosses, Nishi is shepherded into the back of a white sedan where they attempt to extort him for a share of his heist. The resulting shootout is almost mechanical, Nishi calmly pointing his gun at each man in turn, proceeding systematically from one to the next like a target shooter at a carnival booth. When he reaches the final thug, a young man he’d warned previously not to test his patience, he says simply, “I warned you” before the camera cuts to an overhead shot of the car. Snow flurries through the air. It recalls the pointillist paintings of disabled former detective Horibe (Ren Osugi), whose work Suicide — pictured above — is a messy slash of red across a field of drifting white. The car itself looks like nothing so much as a coffin in the agonizingly prolonged moments before muzzle flash lights its windows from within. Why water dead flowers? Why chase a debt that’s already repaid? Because we want something else, and we know we can’t have it, but we can reach. We can strain. We can try.