“I didn't realize how much I'd missed Japanese movies until I saw Takeshi Kitano's Hana-Bi… Here was a film, in the unlikely form of a violent crime thriller crossed with a domestic melodrama, that captured a sense of sublime transcendency not much felt since the golden age of Mizoguchi, Ozu and Naruse. Yet Kitano's sensibility remains resolutely modern; his is a world of jagged discontinuity, of harsh contrasts in tone and style, that is deeply indebted to post-war ironists like Oshima and Imamura. In a sense, Kitano is the one-man embodiment of the great contemporary period the Japanese cinema never had.” (Dave Kehr)

When receiving the Golden Lion in Venice, Kitano said: “Now, I am a master”. Kitano was, and still is, very critical about his own work and needs complete confidence in himself. With “Sonatine” he felt that he had finished his apprentice period and had reached a for him acceptable level of understanding film, with “Hana-Bi”, he had finished his master period and graduated with honours, in form of the award. Indeed, Kitano was now a master.

“Hana-Bi” is a very personal film, so personal, that I see it bordering exorcism, as Kitano’s inner demons are being confronted. Not surprisingly, the entire first part of the film is told thru complex ellipses noting upon reflection and after thought. As Nishi, who almost has lost everything, thinks about what he has lost and what he has left, so is Kitano; And where Nishi robs a bank and uses the money to take his dying wife on a last trip thru Japan, Kitano made “Hana-Bi”.

It is not without reason that Kehr mentions Mizoguchi and Ozu alongside Kitano. Mootori’s concept of “mono no aware”, that we experience the wholeness of life by encountering things (mono) and being sensitive to them (no aware), hence having them moving us, is an integrated motif in both directors films, and also here in “Hana-Bi”. While we see in Nishi, it is even more visible in the side plot about Horibe, who being paralysed and bound to a wheelchair rediscovers the world that surrounds him and expressing it thru painting (what Kitano actually began doing himself after the accident).

The story is simple: Nishi is an ex-cop, who has lost just about everything, and facing the death of his wife, who has cancer, he decides rob a bank, thus being able to travel Japan with his wife, feeling life once more before it all ends.

One of the best Japanese films ever made, “Hana-Bi” is the central work of Kitano, both as an artist and as a person. It liberated him, it allowed him to have fun again, which he sure did in his following film “Kikujiro” and it sat him free of the past. He certainly is a master.

Henrik Sylow of kitanotakeshi.com