Takeshis’

(Kitano Takeshi, Japan)

There’s an ocean and the better part of a century separating Buster Keaton and Kitano Takeshi, but it’s possible to see the two men as kindred spirits. Both began their careers on the stage: Keaton as a tumbler in vaudeville routines, Kitano as a stand-up comic working within Japan’s comparably venerated manzai tradition. Both managed to parlay these talents into movie stardom, their iconic status bound up in their ability to remain implacable in the midst of elaborately choreographed chaos. Recall Keaton’s Olympian detachment as his railroad worker faces down a steamrolling train in The General (1928) or Kitano’s lock-jawed resignation as bullets whiz by in either of his great Yakuza pictures, Sonatine (1993) or Hana-Bi (1997): craven facades signifying either heroic resolve or pathological denial or both.

Of course, there’s more to these men than their curiously expressive inexpressiveness: as director-stars, they constructed their personal iconographies on both sides of the camera. Keaton’s career trajectory was ultimately rather tragic: the 20s yielded no fewer than four meticulously produced masterpieces— The Navigator and Sherlock Jr. in 1924, The General and Steamboat Bill Jr. in 1928—but his forays into studio filmmaking over the next decade brought only creative atrophy and personal crisis. He was reduced to doing commercials and lending his recognizable body and weighty imprimatur to two short-lived variety series ( The Buster Keaton Show and Life With Buster Keaton ) but television’s weekly grind proved too taxing. Appearing in Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight in 1952, shortly before his death in 1955, his great stone face had calcified into a ruined mask, and he lamented—in character as an aged vaudevillian, but also seemingly straight from the gut—“if one more person tells me this is just like old times, I swear I’ll jump out the window.”

It’s a sentiment Kitano Takeshi might echo: indeed, his new film Takeshis’ takes Keaton’s acid remark and distends it to feature length. Kitano had arguably the greatest run of any Japanese filmmaker in the 90s, producing the aforementioned Yakuza masterpieces and, in so doing, recasting the idea of a national cinema that fulfilled artistic and commercial imperatives in his own image. But his subsequent films lapsed into self-indulgence—the saccharine (but funny) road movie Kikujiro (2000) courts self-parody, while the crowd-pleasing sword-epic Zatoichi (2003) is as preoccupied with its hyphenate-creator’s star persona as with the traditional folk hero at its centre. Kitano’s stubbornly redundant themes and familiar stylistic eccentricities gave these films the appearance of retreads. His winking cameos in inferior genre exercises like Battle Royale (2000) only furthered the suspicion that Kitano was a spent force.

Takeshis’ confirms this suspicion, but, paradoxically, it’s also the most surprising and probably the most affirmative film that Kitano’s ever made. It’s a movie about the old times that make Kitano want to jump out the window—a fugue of self-excoriation and self-doubt that suggests that, at least behind the camera, the stone face is starting to crack. In front of it, he’s still very much Kitano Takeshi: which is to say he’s actually playing Kitano Takeshi, movie industry power broker and Japanese uber-celebrity. When he sees the dailies for his latest yakuza quickie, he wears an expression of weary acceptance. Kitano also plays his own look-alike—a willfully mute struggling actor who runs into his doppelganger after an audition and asks for an autograph. This exchange is the jumping-off point for a meta-movie that’s richer and more affecting than anything dreamed up by the comparatively callow likes of Charlie Kaufman or Quentin Tarantino: the Emperor made resplendent by his nakedness.

The jaw-dropping prologue, set in World War II, finds a fallen Kitano looking helplessly down the barrel of a gun being brandished American soldier. It’s an easily readable metaphor—the artist acknowledging his neutered acquiescence to the demands of an international market. Kitano tried to permeate Hollywood with the Los Angeles-set gangster opus Brother (2000), but only succeeded in further ghettoizing himself as an emissary of glowering expensively tailored Japanese otherness—a walking semiotic system in search of a decent script. The Brother -issue Kitano appears quite frequently in Takeshis’— when the look-alike returns home after meeting his idol, he lapses into an extended fever dream in which he imagines (shades of Charlie Kaufman) what it would be like to be Kitano Takeshi. Turns out it’s a lot like starring in one of his yakuza movies, meaning that your dialogue is terse, your motivations are cloudy, bad guys in suits are forever shooting at you, and a pair obese clowns are trailing you to the seaside for some wholesome capering. Takeshis’ is gleeful and relentless in inventorying the clichés of Kitano’s filmography. There’s slapstick comedy, macho posturing, theatrical interludes, and extended dance breaks.

But don’t call it a checklist (or a Fellini movie with an inflated squib budget). This is quite simply the movie that Kitano had to make circa 2005, if only to get it out of his system. If the ornate puppet-show Dolls (2002) was the icon’s meek attempt to eliminate himself from the mise-en-scene, this film is a defiant gesture of acceptance. Kitano understands that his reputation not only precedes him, but that for a great swath of his fan-base—not the mention the festival-circuit critics, whose adoration and interest have buoyed his profile—he will forever be the pistol-toting man in black whose visage adorns the walls of indie-video stores and dorm rooms alike. With his 60th birthday looming, he may see himself as neuter of Keaton’s sad vintage—or as “Mr. Clown,” a disparaging self-bestowed nickname that is literalized in one of the film’s many great sight gags—but unlike his spiritual predecessor, he’s chosen to go down with both barrels blazing.

—Adam Nayman

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