'Sonatine': No Rest for the Weary in a World of ViolenceApril 10, 1998'Sonatine': No Rest for the Weary in a World of ViolenceRelated Articles.Forum.By STEPHEN HOLDENear the end of 'Sonatine,' Takeshi Kitano's haunting elegy to the gangster way of life, an assassin's sidekick crouches in the driveway of a hotelin the middle of the night and gazes up at a window that is suddenly lighted by repeated orange flashes and muffled popping sounds. What's happening in the room isn't a photo shoot or a fireworks demonstration.

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It'sa brutal mass execution carried out with automatic weapons.Credit:Rolling ThunderTakeshi Kitano, right, who playing a middle-aged yakuza gangster, roughs up a rival in the film ``Sonatine,' which he also wrote and directed.The power of the moment lies in what we don't see. In a brilliant stroke that probably no other director would have dared, the film's climactic blood bath is left to our imaginations. The violence is paradoxically diminished and romanticizedby being contemplated from afar like a distant thunderstorm rumbling and flickering on the edge of a plain or a far-off Fourth of July fireworks display barely visible above the horizon.The sadness of the moment relates directly to an earlier nighttime scene on a deserted beach in which a group of young hoodlums awaiting instructions playfully stage a mock gangland war, complete with improvised fortresses and shields,in which they shoot fireworks at one another across the sand. Like the flickering hotel window, this fiery boys' game seems at once poignant in its innocence and ominous because of the players' intense enthusiasm. What elsedo these young hoods do when they're not busy killing one another, the movie wonders? Why, of course, they spend their time coltishly pretending to kill one another.' Sonatine,' made in 1994, predates the Japanese director's art-house hit 'Fireworks' by three years and is arguably stronger than its successor.

In 'Sonatine,' the filmmaker and star (under his actingname Beat Takeshi), plays a middle-aged yakuza gangster named Murakama who is considering retirement. Reluctantly, he accepts an assignment from his mobster boss to go to Okinawa to settle a dispute between two rival factions. Withhis lieutenant, Takahashi (Kenichi Yajima), he enlists a bunch of brash young thugs to accompany him. Once they reach Okinawa, Murakama begins to suspect that he himself is in danger of being murdered by rivals eager to appropriatehis turf.Much of the film is set at a mobster's seaside retreat where Murakama and his henchmen camp out while waiting for directions. In these ravishingly beautiful scenes, the movie gazes at the world through Murakama's weary eyes,drinking in the loveliness of the beach and the turquoise ocean, and taking in the sounds of wind and sea gulls in medium and long-distance shots that evoke a tropical idyll contaminated by a sense of danger. It would all be so dreamyif the potential for lethal violence were not lurking behind every corner.During this time, Murakama becomes involved with a local gun-crazed yakuza groupie who professes to admire him because he is not afraid of dying.

He replies dryly that the reason he is no longer afraid to die is that living with the constantfear of death has made life not worth living.When violence is shown in this film, it is usually portrayed in the director's signature style, erupting suddenly amid absolute stillness in a spasm that is over almost before it begins. During these eruptions, witnesses remain impassiveand poker-faced as though they were frozen in a trance.Two of the film's most hypnotic sequences involve gangland revenge and retribution. In one, Murakama supervises the midnight punishment of a man who is lowered by crane into the harbor for increasingly lengthy dunkings. In another,he looks on as a man in a car by the ocean is shot, the vehicle set ablaze, and the summer sky is scarred with clouds of black acrid smoke. After each scene, Murakama turns away in disgust, his eyes a little deader than before. Asgorgeous as it is, 'Sonatine' does not glorify violence.PRODUCTION NOTESSONATINERating: Sonatine' is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has scenes of violence and brief nudity.Written (in Japanese, with English subtitles), directed and edited by Takeshi Kitano; director of photography, Katsumi Yanagishima; music by Jo Hasaishi; produced by Masayuki Mori, Hisao Nabeshima and Takeo Yoshida; released by RollingThunder Pictures.

Running time: 94 minutes. This film is rated R.Cast: 'Beat' Takeshi Kitano (Murakama), Tetsu Watanabe (Uechi), Aya Kokumai (Miyuki), Masanobu Katsumura (Ryoji), Susumu Terashima (Ken), Ren Ohsugi (Katagiri), Tonbo Zushi (Kitajima), Kenichi Yajima (Takahashi) and Eiji Minakata(the Hit Man).

Upon arriving at the beach house to which he has fled – ostensibly escaping the treacherous warfare that threatened to interrupt his attempts to escape the mobster lifestyle he has lived up to this point – Murakawa (Takeshi Kitano) along with a handful of his underlings pass the time playing improvised games and performing practical jokes. So proceeds the middle (and most striking) portion of Takeshi Kitano’s international breakthrough Sonatine (Takeshi Kitano, 1993). Distinct from the locatable (albeit idiosyncratic) Yakuza settings that bookend this film, this middle portion marks the emergence of a radically different mode that haunts both the remainder and, retroactively, the start of the film. But the film’s narrative is not all that is altered here. This article will argue that genre, this film’s genre and conceptions of genre in general, are also radically reconfigured. By way of this middle section, I will contend, a new understanding of genre is given the space to emerge, a gesture that is echoed by the trajectory of Kitano’s career outside just this film. Ultimately, it is the capacity to demand recategorisation, so clearly articulated by this sequence that accounts not only for Kitano’s brand of cinema, but also his star persona in general.Despite its international success, Sonatine met with box office difficulty in Japan.

Aaron Gerow notes that difficulty in labeling the film’s genre (or genres) at least in part led to its initial domestic box office failure. Murakawa and company play with paper dollsBut the construction of this game also signals something else, an ability of the characters to likewise construct a narrative system. Indeed, as the sequence progresses the characters, and Murakawa in particular, are in strange ways seemingly in – perhaps partial – control of the events that take place. As the scene progresses two of the lesser gangsters proceed (through a series of ellipses) to build a Sumo ring on the beach and engage in a comical match with a much larger third Yakuza. Murakawa watches as the much larger gangster – shirt removed and with Yakuza tattoos in full view – comically dispatches the smaller men in a very brief Sumo battle. The conclusion of an improvised Sumo matchFollowing this moment is a single gesture that drastically alters this sequence, and indeed the film as a whole. With both the lesser henchmen down, the onlookers (Murakawa and Miyuki, another character he has just met) run into the frame and place the defeated men near each other as though they were inanimate objects.

The trio (now including the victorious Sumo wrestler) proceeds to beat on the ground in much the same fashion and rhythm used to move the paper dolls. Paddling to move the newest paper dollsIn response to this drumming of the ground, the two figures begin to move, as though the pounding were propelling them in much the same way as it did the dolls. As this strange dance is performed, the music, which has been slowly building throughout the sequence, swells, as does the camera, which cranes up and over the figures. The speed of the paddling increases, and so does what appears to be the stop motion photography that animates the sequence, lending the moment an oneiric feel. The scene then abruptly ends.In relation to Deleuze’s “seer,” this sequence serves as a particularly valuable outlier. Rather than a lost, perhaps passive viewer, Murakawa is without a doubt in control of the movement of this sequence. In fact, he has control to such a degree that time and space seem to cohere to the character’s wishes.

The paddling of the sand – a gesture that Murakawa and Miyuki seem to take to intuitively – declares the characters’ dominance over the causal world of the film. And yet, narratively speaking, the characters are nonetheless constrained; they are disallowed from leaving this place or from progressing past this point.

The banality of this sequence in relation to the plot has forced not only a deferral of action, but also a literal breakdown of progression in any traditional sense. The characters, still beholden to the plot in terms of their escape from this scenario, have squeezed from the conventions of the narrative a moment in which they assert themselves as authors.Deleuze says of the time-image, “Between the reality of the setting and that of the action, it is no longer a motor extension which is established, but rather a dreamlike connection through the intermediary of the liberated sense organs. It is as if the action floats in the situation rather than bringing it to a conclusion or strengthening it.” This scene serves, then, not only as a system for encouraging this ability to reconnect thoughts through the deferral of action and the subsequent liberation of the senses, but it also simultaneously reenacts this process within the world of the film. That is, Murakawa and company are free here to radically re-author this space and this narrative, to uproot the causal world that they are forced to occupy and to radically refigure this world. This is not to say, however, that the authorship that the characters (as authors) present is legible; it is, like the world of the seer, indeterminate. There is action here, but that action has ceased to provide clarity or narrative movement, and instead pushes the moment only further into a space of contingency. What this scene enacts, then, is a reconfiguration of control, but one that yields no particular outcome.

Authorship here changes hands, but in such a way that meaning in general is deferred. What persists is a kind of gap, a questioning of narrative direction that yields only greater ambiguity. Time in this sequence becomes irrational, it is all ellipses and culminates even in a stop-motion effect in which killing time serves only in extending it.In The Poetics of Space Gaston Bachelard poses that rational understandings of the world must disavow the gaps and openings that might undermine them, and addresses the way that these disavowed fissures between meanings can split open and swallow a world all at once – a process most clearly achieved for him by way of art. Aaron Gerow, Kitano Takeshi (London: BFI, 2007), p. 101. Ibid., p.

101-102. James Ursini, “Takeshi Kitano: Melancholy Poet of the Yakuza Film,” In Gangster Film Reader, ed.

Alain Silver and James Ursini (Pompton Plains, NJ: Limelight Editions, 2007), p. 226. Ibid., p. 228. Aaron Gerow, Kitano Takeshi (London: BFI, 2007), p. 115. Donato Totaro, “Sono Otoko, Kyobi Ni Tsuki / Violent Cop,” In The Cinema of Japan and Korea, ed.

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Justin Boywer (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), p. 136. Darrell William Davis, “Reigniting Japanese Tradition with Hana-Bi,” Cinema Journal 40, no.

59. Ibid. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (New York: Continuum, 2005), p. 3.

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Ibid., p. 4. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Trans. Maria Jolas (New York: The Orion Press, 1964), p. Xiv-xv.

Ibid., p. Xxviii.

I’m thinking here of Rick Altman’s account of the way that genres develop in predictable patterns: Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: BFI Publishing, 1999), p. 21-22. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (New York: Continuum, 2005), p. 8. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Trans.

Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Continuum, 2005), p. 113. Ibid., p. 123.

Tadao Sato, Currents in Japanese Cinema, Trans. Gregory Barrett (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), p. 53.

Mark Schilling, The Yakuza Movie Book: A Guide to Japanese Gangster Films (Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2003), p. 19.

Ibid., p. 39.

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (New York: Continuum, 2005), p. 9.

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Continuum, 2005), p.

123. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Trans.

Maria Jolas (New York: The Orion Press, 1964), p. Xxix.

Ibid. Ibid., p.