TIFF Report: Takeshis’ Review

So, to kind of establish what kind of a guy ‘Beat’ Takeshi is, despite never having met him, I have a favorite story about him. There’s probably few directors or film stars I have that about, I don’t often bore people by telling them about that time Martin Scorsese said something really funny on the set of Taxi Driver, or anything. So the story goes that Beat Takeshi finally got his big break, after years of struggling through auditions and failed comedy attempts such as his comedy duo ‘Two Beat’ - an appearance on a morning TV show, the kind of light news program you probably watch before you go to work. So he comes on, and his opening is this joke -

“I was coming to the television studio today, and I saw a piece of shit. I looked at it, it looked like a piece of shit. So I smelled it, and it smelled like a piece of shit! So I tasted it, and what do you know? It tasted like a piece of shit!”

It might lose something in the translation, I guess. But I like it. It’s an excessive joke, but uses minimalist repetition, and you’re not entirely sure, in the end, why it’s funny.

I originally intended to attempt to give a plot synopsis of this film, but it’s so confusing I might just not bother. But the blurbs surrounding this film, mostly making it seem as this is some sort of quite mundane ‘what would you do if you had a doppelganger?’ wacky mistaken identity/team up flick. This it is very much not. What it is, first, is excessive.

Kitano’s films, of course, particularly the ones in which he features as ‘Beat’ Takeshi, and usually as a Yakuza, are often thought of as absurdly violent, even if they aren’t functionally so. Here he takes this impression of him to absolutely comical extremes. While without a doubt the Arnold Schwarzenegger film ‘Commando’ is one of my all time favorite guilty pleasures, here I was almost bored by the volume of gunplay. Mostly in the form of post-modern jokery, of course, but listening to the relentless thud of machine gun fire began to tire me. The body count is absolutely absurd – though, if you’re feeling generous and consider every character that he kills more than once only one ‘body’, then you can probably divide that count by about 10.

For this film is minimalist in its excess. While the film uses a vast amount of characters, locations, CGI, action sequences, and so on, a version of this film lacking any repeated sequences with variation would last about 20 minutes. Kitano repeats sequences at what seems like an exponential rate as the film goes on, continuously messing with your memory of the last version of a scene by altering the reality of the current version. A scene in a noodle shop is played out as a memory, then a joke about that memory, then an audition for the scene about the noodle shop, then as an actual occurrence (with an extra joke) then again as a memory of the audition, then again. (Probably. I’d lost count.) Each subtle variation keeps it interesting, and it’s here you can see the skill Kitano has a technical editor (performed with the help of Yoshinori Ota) as it must have been incredibly complex to knit together the strands of this film’s web. It’s no surprise that Kitano’s original idea was called ‘Fractal’.

Of course, while his skill at editing his films technically to elicit emotion is clear here, it certainly seems that he is lacking in ability to edit his films critically. Though the film is already a fairly lean 108 minutes, he could have been hurt by simply his attempts to do too much and cram too much in. He includes, it seems, almost everyone who’s ever been in a film with (sadly IMDB don’t have a cast list up, and I’m no good with names) but, for example, he therefore includes several, long appearances from The Stripes, the ‘Stomp’-esque performers who were already an unwelcome appearance in Zatoichi. However, despite his use of CGI at several points, people will be glad to hear that any blood spilled is real (well, as real as Karo Syrup and food coloring, I’d hope) getting rid of the very, very fake looking CGI blood also from Zatoichi – which to my memory was intended to be ‘playful’ rather than disturbing (and in the end actually just rubbish.)

But the longer Takeshis’ goes on, somehow, the funnier it gets. Somewhere around about the point where a Tokyo street worker (they wear incredibly obvious uniforms, and they are completely different things from Tokyo street walkers, if you skimmed that) was bumping a giant caterpillar’s head into the ground using one of those tripod things you see street workers using (I don’t know the name offhand) marshaled by a couple of sumo wrestlers (who also play fat comedians, noisy noodle slurpers, riot police… And more, I think.) I started to crack up, quite loudly, where as previously my laughter was polite at best. Make no mistake, this film is chock full of Kitano’s absurdist humor, my favorite joke being a quite blue visualization of a turntablist’s imagined attempts at foreplay.

In Takeshis’, Kitano has created a smorgasbord, a twisted confusion of all his genres up to that point played out as a fantasy inside his doppelganger’s head, in which absolutely nothing is real (and nor are you expected to believe it so) and there is almost no chronology of images. However, due to that, the film is ultimately unsatisfying, with no particular area (the action, the humor, the touching moments, the beautiful cinematography) able to stand out. Dolls, for example, which I’ve often found quite unfairly maligned by usual Kitano fans, was a film about the cinematography, and as that’s something I admire (see my Workingman’s Death review) I loved it. This is a film that I honestly feel is about the editing. I walked out having enjoyed the film but totally baffled, and not entirely sure if I would ever bother to watch it again. The images are not asking you to unravel them through repeated viewings, merely to enjoy the experience. Editors, however, will be the ones who enjoy it the most, I’d imagine.