I have never enjoyed Kitano because he is "distinctly Japanese" (whatever that means), nor found satisfaction in the realization that the characters he plays in his crime melodramas are the modern incarnation of an ancient Japanese code or custom. (In the West, the Japanese never create anything new, but are perpetually modernizing their old ways, which means our view of them contains a strange contradiction: They are both futuristic and ancient.) His crime films impress me on a level that exhausts any kind of political or social language. In Sonatine, Fireworks, and parts of Boiling Point, I encounter instead the murky and embarrassing language of my own fear of death; my secret disappointment at the way the world is structured; and my sense of powerlessness not only in the face of big and small events that surround me, but with my own body--breathing, the beating of my heart, and so on.
True, there are other works of art that speak to (or form a language for) this intimate space--Dinah Washington's "This Bitter Earth," or Billie Holiday's "Don't Explain"--but no one expresses the emotion as clearly and eloquently as Kitano does in his crime films. And I stress his crime films because his other movies--like A Scene by the Sea, in which a deaf garbage collector learns how to surf, or even his new film Kikujiro, a "road movie" that is "lighter and more playful"--address another language, another emotion much closer to the surface of my being.
This spring, Kitano finished shooting Brother, a crime thriller starring Omar Epps that is Kitano's first Hollywood picture. What I hope more than anything else is not that he translates samurai aesthetics into Hollywood terms (a pleasure for the professional film critic, no doubt), but that he continues to create and develop the language of my deepest sorrow.
