Fireworks
(Hana-bi)
Screening on Film
Directed by Takeshi Kitano.
With Takeshi Kitan, Kayoko Kishimoto, Ren Osugi.
Japan, 1997, 35mm, color, 103 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.
With Takeshi Kitan, Kayoko Kishimoto, Ren Osugi.
Japan, 1997, 35mm, color, 103 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.
One of the most commercially and critically successful filmmakers in contemporary Japanese cinema, Takeshi Kitano is known for an austere style that combines stillness, quiet, and emotional understatement with elliptical editing and sudden, brutal violence. In Fireworks (as in most of his films), Kitano acts as well, playing Nishi, a hard-boiled loner cop dealing with multiple recent tragedies, caring for his cancer-stricken wife, and indebted to the Japanese mafia. Named one of the decade’s top ten films by a 2000 Village Voice critics' poll, Fireworks is a striking blend of humor, pathos, and rage in which bloodshed shares screen time with its counterpoint, the surreal paintings (by Kitano) of Nishi’s paralyzed ex-partner.
