I Would Like to See It: Sonatine

“When you're scared all the time,” says mid-level Yakuza gangster Murakawa (Takeshi Kitano) to his much younger girlfriend Miyuki (Aya Kokumai), “you reach a point when you wish you were dead.” Murakawa says it half-jokingly, but the truth of it rings through the entirety of Sonatine. Kitano, who both wrote and directed in addition to playing the lead, sketches a picture of early ‘90s Yakuza life as almost satirically flat and bland, his criminal hideouts dull office buildings, his shootouts consisting of rival gangsters standing perfectly still and firing at each other without a trace of expression. Even the film’s climactic gunfight is just men standing in place while assault rifle fire rips through them, more carnival shooting gallery than Scarface killing spree.

During the half of the film set at a beachfront hideout in Okinawa, though, this flatness slowly ebbs away into an idle, easy intimacy. The gangsters relax interpersonal boundaries and spend their days playing games with paper cutout soldiers, making mock sumo rings out of seaweed, and, in one ethereally beautiful scene, staging team battles armed with braces of Roman candles. The whistle of the fireworks and the bright sodium flare as they streak like comets over sand and through the night sky is imbued with all the adrenaline and motion the film’s gunfights lack. Here, not at the bleeding edge of life and death, is where Murakawa and his subordinates can experience the world around them. It’s as the gangster says: constant fear of death collapses one’s world to a desire to get out, to a numb focus on termination.

Yet Kitano presents no overarching thesis on the inherent goodness of organized criminals when removed from their element and allowed to discover themselves. The film simply observes, its tone sometimes warm but never overfamiliar. The absence of fear allows these men to unfold into fuller human beings. Its return compresses them at once back into their accustomed shapes. The deadly elevator shootout in which most of the film’s core cast dies within the span of five seconds brings the final ax blade down on the second act’s carefree exhilaration. Did they mean nothing to each other, to hide behind one another’s bodies as lead flies, or is it only that all an animal can do when pressed into a corner is throw itself at its attacker, mindlessly violent and selfish?