Sonatine (1993) is the greatest Yakuza / gangster movie I’ve ever seen (light spoilers)

Awhile back I tripped across this fan video set to Aphex Twin’s song Alberto Balsalm:

https://youtu.be/s4pQ5aj6vx8?si=cKqPz9ob_wFMBy-K

At first I didn’t think anything of it - just a bunch of random movie clips from some random Takeshi Kitano movie. I mean I love the guy, huge fan, but he’s acted in, directed, written, and edited a billion zillion things. So even as a fan you can’t see it all.

But the imagery from that clip kept coming back to me, and eventually I looked up Sonatine (1993).

Again, nothing about it stood out as earth-shattering at first glance. The poster was pretty non-descript. Takeshi Kitano wrote, directed, and starred in the movie, and Google’s quick summary was just:

A Japanese mobster attempts to even the score when he realises he and his lackeys have been pawns in a lethal game.

7.5 / 10 on IMDB.

So… whatever, right?

But how does that little revenge plot match these beach scenes from the video? What actually happens?

Eventually my curiosity got the better of me and I found a copy (which was NOT easy!), and sat down for a little generic gangster romp about tough guys trying to out-tough guy each other.

Except it’s not that. At all.

It starts off grim, with a bunch of guys so used to creating misery for a living that they’re completely numb to it, and numb to the rest of their lives as a result. There’s some Yakuza politics which leads into a small war, bang bang boom boom smash smash kablooie… and then our guys need to get out of town for awhile to let things cool off.

And then we’re just in a shack by the beach in the middle of nowhere. There’s no TV, the world is pre-Internet, and the chaos of their world is just gone. So with nothing to do they play games on the beach, get to know each other on a level they couldn’t before, and go through a kind of mini-childhood as they rediscover what it’s like to just be people again.

And for Takeshi Kitano’s character, that also means meeting a local girl and developing feelings for her.

And his past starts to bother him. All the awful stuff he used to do is rolling around in the back of his head and he does his best to suppress it, to just be with the boys, play, live a simple existence, show affection to someone for once.

And then… the world catches up to them, and it’s time to get back in the game.

There’s this shot of him on the beach throwing a frisbee against the wind, desperately trying to hang on to the newfound sense of innocence they’d built, while the rest of the characters stand by and watch him in… dismay? Confusion?

And then we slip back into Yakuza politics and death. And it’s tense and thrilling and crushingly tragic… because now even if you win you lose.

Out of every gangster movie I’ve ever seen this is the only one that’s actually effective at communicating the absolute tragedy of this loss of compassion, the loss of connection and caring for others, of what actually makes life worth living, all for the sake of being a “tough guy”. So often we glorify a character’s commitment to their path, even when that path is a dark one. Here, finally, we actually comprehend that walking a dark path is a bad thing.

If you can somehow find it, see it. It’s a hidden gem.

Submitted October 22, 2023 at 07:27PM by Ohigetjokes https://ift.tt/yfeJt5U