Blood and Bones (Chi To Hone) Review

Posted by Todd Brown at 2:13pm.

Posted in Film & DVD Reviews , Drama, Asia.

Much has been made of Takeshi Kitano’s performance in Yoichi Sai’s Blood and Bones, an acclaimed drama following a Korean immigrant family in Japan. Taking place over a forty year span from Kim Shun-Pei’s arrival in Osaka in 1923 through to his death, Kitano essentially is the film his presence infesting every frame whether he is on camera or not. Based on the true story of author Yan Sogiru’s own family and captured on film by Toichi Sai – himself an ethnic Korean living in Japan – Kitano plays Kim as a brutish, abhorrent man, making his entrance to the film by beating and raping his wife in full view of his young daughter. Kitano’s performance is stellar, easily the standout in a film that also features Joe Odagiri and Susumu Terajima, but regardless of the strong performances, possibly even because of them, two and a half hours of continual domestic violence makes for very difficult going.

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Reader Comments

Ramen89 04/18/2006 @ 5:45am

Im a big fan of Takeshi but I thought this movie was just plain boring, I must be the only person that preferred Takeshis’ a hell of a lot more.
Caterpillar 04/18/2006 @ 8:29am

I heard we get to see Kitano’s penis in this film. Is that true?
Isao K 04/18/2006 @ 9:39am

Yes. It is a big fogged out blur, like most Japanese men’s penises.

It’s a harrowing viewing experience, but once I got caught up in Shun-Pei’s world, I was fully engrossed. It’s easy to see how Sai was fascinated by, and even may have had a certain fondness for this monster, and what made him tick. I could totally imagine him directing that late in the film funeral brawl w/ gusto. Expert acting all around, a careful attention to period detail, and an all-anchoring, gung-ho performance by Beat Takeshi = one of my favorite films of 2004.
Todd Brown 04/18/2006 @ 7:24pm

Most of the nudity is masked by camera angles and things of that sort. The big bath house sequence is largely shot behind what I took to be a pane of frosted glass but now that Isao K points it out it could very easily have been a superimposed digital blur as well. There are definitely spots where you’d expect to see units swinging freely and there are none to actually be found, but it’s done so inobtrusively that the touching up didn’t bother me at all. This is the only version I’ve seen so I can’t comment on whether anything was actually cut but it certainly didn’t feel like it to me.
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