Following a wildly successful run of distinctive, genre-bending films, stretching from the late-eighties into the early-2000s, Takeshi Kitano turned his camera inwards with a trilogy of semi-autobiographical metadramas designed to interrogate his work, his life, and his public persona. I’ve long been a fan of Kitano, but I’ve never, for whatever reason, been able to muster much enthusiasm to seek these ones out. Having recently watched Broken Rage, a film that riffs on Kitano’s history in gritty crime dramas and slapstick comedies, it feels as if now is a good time to look back at the films he made about himself, or at least a version of himself, and try to make sense of them. As always with Kitano, it’s impossible to know who or what you’re going to get.
A successful actor and a failed one, doppelgängers of one another, briefly come face-to-face in the back room of a TV studio before parting ways. Noting the similarity, they each imagine the life of the other to such an extent that reality folds in on itself. Scenes are repeated in new contexts, actors appear in different roles, and the same images return again and again as these two lives start to converge: a sad clown, a bloodied gangster, a caterpillar in a bouquet of flowers. Each man dreams of the other, and then the dreams dream too. But they all end in disappointment. Kitano uses this dovetailing structure to imagine another life, free of the violence that made his name, but it always manages to creep back in. He's a product of that violence and cannot imagine a world without it, as much as he wants to escape from it. A film of artistic exhaustion from a filmmaker in crisis. An attempt by Kitano to make sense of it all by plunging into himself and bouncing back out again. And so, it starts and ends with a gunfight.
Anything but glory. An imagined Kitano, dragging around a perpetually arch-browed dummy of himself, is scrambling for ideas for what to do next: Ozu sells, so let’s do that. Or J-horror, or science-fiction, or martial arts, or a nostalgic ode to childhood. Anything for the market, just not the gangster films he’s vowed to leave behind. He’s good at that. He’s done it for years, and audiences want to see them. Kitano presents fragments of these films and they all feel somehow wrong. Parodic. Insincere. Tired. Nothing works. He fails, again and again, struggling to connect to material that doesn’t suit him. And so, in exasperation, he throws everything into a bizarre, high-concept slapstick comedy that blends it all into one movie. That movie, in the end, is this one. An absurd, freewheeling work of self-deprecation and frustration, but equally a film in which an artist eventually stops aiming for success and follows his instincts, just to see what happens. And if what happens is anything to go by, filmmaking for Kitano is an act of total madness. At the film’s end, he asks his doctor how his brain is. The doctor simply replies: “Broken.”
At first, a simple portrait of the artist as a young man, with tragedy and adversity forging in him a resolute commitment to art as a means of survival. And all signs point to a major talent on the verge of breaking through. Time passes. He keeps painting, but nothing changes. His work doesn’t sell. He tries again, and that doesn’t sell either. Again and again. Kitano, whose own paintings are used in the film, frames this Sisyphean pursuit of financial success as an increasingly desperate and destructive one. The more he studies art, the further he gets from it, and the more he listens to the critiques of an art dealer, the more derivative his work becomes. Even as his failures tear his family apart, he keeps trying. The next one will be the big one, and then all of this neglect will have been worth it. A film about escaping reality while striving to capture it in art, as well as a lacerating portrait of a man who can no longer tell the difference between artistic expression and the ephemeral whims of the market.