A bit hard to explain what this film is like since it's one of those films that places emphasis on feeling rather than understanding. While I was watching, I got the impression that the plot was secondary to the crushing weight of inevitability. Here is a man with a troubled past, careening towards an even more tragic future.

And what do you do when you're saddled with tragedy and ostensibly have nothing to look forward to? According to Kitano, all you can do is soldier on. There's an atmosphere of banality to this that is excruciating to sit through, because it's so reflective of the minutiae of daily life - but in this story, there's an underlying sense of grief, a moroseness coming from a man that's grieving the moment that he's standing in, even before it slides out of its grasp.

They say that the greatest mark of maturity is the ability to be present, to face whatever pain is happening to you without flinching and without distraction. That kind of stoicism pervades this entire piece, not just in the performances, but most notably in the production elements: incredibly spartan use of dialogue, the way they use silence until it feels like it takes up space in a scene, and the anticlimactic use of violence.

There's a pointed restraint to this film, where it avoids the adrenaline-dependent trappings of what, by all intents and purposes, is an action narrative - a man on the run from the Yakuza who's trying to save his dying wife? Not a single car chase, not a single shoot-out, not a single frame of distraction from the unbearable emptiness and loneliness of grief.

----

Part of r/Letterboxd Film Club
42. Golden Lions