Japanese Filmmaker Takeshi Kitano Disappoints with Samurai Epic ‘Kubi’ at Cannes Film Festival

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Japanese Filmmaker Takeshi Kitano Disappoints with Samurai Epic ‘Kubi’ at Cannes Film Festival

In the early ’90s, Takeshi “Beat” Kitano was a force to be reckoned with. His nuanced crime movies were a breath of fresh air in a sea of good-vs.-evil bullet operas coming out of Hong Kong. Kitano’s darkly funny cynicism (who else could have made Violent Cop?) made him stand out by miles. But as time went on, his cynicism became his weakness, as evidenced by the experimental, semi-autobiographical trilogy that followed the success of Zatoichi in 2013. It seemed like self-sabotage, the work of a frustrated artist trying to take a blowtorch to his populist image without much thought for the future.

The collateral damage was his international reputation, which took a hit to the extent that his next trilogy, the Outrage series, was generally received as the half-hearted work of a bored auteur. But taken together, the three films might arguably be Kitano’s hidden masterpiece, a yakuza epic in the vein of Kinji Fukasaku’s incredible Battles Without Honor and Humanity. Unfortunately, the Outrage trilogy suffered because it followed Hollywood’s co-option of the Asian crime movie oeuvre, notably with The Departed, Martin Scorsese’s lackluster Oscar-winning remake of Hong Kong hit Infernal Affairs. Kitano went the other way, like Fukasaku seeing the yakuza movie as a kind of working-man’s blues, a bleak, brutal lament reflecting the diminishing returns of Japan’s gangland life in the real world as it fragmented and imploded.

Kitano’s new movie, Kubi, promises to do the same for samurai movies, but it falls short. The action is some of his best, the humor some of his very darkest, and there’s a committed attempt to skewer the most ridiculously romanticized notions that surround the classic samurai period. But where a surfeit of characters in a yakuza movie adds to the rich tapestry of underworld life, in a period movie things can get too complicated, with the result that loyalties get confusing, and so many people die that it’s hard to recall who did who, and why, when the credits roll.

The inspiration for Kubi is the real-life “Honnō-ji Incident” of June 1582, which saw the attempted assassination of rapacious daimyo Oda Nobunaga, Japan’s would-be one-nation ruler. The chaos that ensues is fitfully enjoyable, but Takeshi Miike, once Kitano’s cheapo V-cinema rival, has covered this territory before and done it much more satisfyingly.

The fact that the film begins with a single headless body and ends with a row of severed heads is a pretty blunt metaphor for this: there’s a fatal sense of disconnect here. But it’s not enough grounds to write off Kitano just yet. His dark energy needs an outlet, and there’s no reason to think that he doesn’t have at least one more killer film – if not another trilogy – inside him.

Title: Kubi
Festival: Cannes Film Festival (Cannes Premiere)
Director-screenwriter: Takeshi Kitano
Cast: Hidetoshi Nishijima, Ryo Kase, Takeshi Beat, Shido Nakamura, Yuichi Kimura, Kenichi Endo, Asano Tadanobu, Nao Omori
Running time: 2 hr 11 min
Sales agent: Kadokawa Corporation

Maya Beaumont

Maya, a film critic based in Los Angeles, developed her analytical skills while studying Journalism at the University of Southern California. Her passion for independent and documentary films led her to become an advocate for underrepresented voices in the industry, offering insightful commentary on their works.

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