Tough guy Kikujiro (Beat Takeshi) is an unlikely candidate to take a sensitive 8-year-old boy Masao (Yusuke Sekiguchi) on a quest to find the mother he's never met (Yuko Ooya). But they're off on a trek through contemporary Japan, where they encounter an odd assortment of offbeat characters. The wandering duo's adventure take them on a madcap tour of the Japanese countryside - from the races to an abandoned high-class hotel and even to a gangster-infested carnival. Kikujiro is about children's games and how they make us see exactly what went wrong in our own lives.
Special Agent Matti
A road movie. In Japan. Japan. The least likely country in which to have a road movie. Yowza.
What's more, it's a road movie about two people who aren't supposed to be together: an innocent child and a hardened crim. Even better, the crim has no idea about children or responsibility. Closet filmmakers take note, this sort of character juxtaposition makes for interesting stories.
On top of its itinerant genericism (Like that phrase? I thought it up all by myself!), Kikujiro is also a farce and a tragedy. It pokes fun at normal people and their everyday lives, and the ways they tie themselves up with laws, rules, customs and traditions. It also rattles skeletons in family closets and highlights the pains and fears they bring to the living.
Takeshi San has created an oeuvre that completely ignores the fin de ciècle need for speed. Like David Lynch's The Straight story, Kikujiro travels at its own pace, never allowing your expectations or desires to push it along. you must subsume your ego into the film's existence, become one with the force and become a Jedi like your...
Oops. I got off track again.
Takeshi and Yusuke are as opposite in the film as they are in life: old and young, master and beginner, wild and ingénu. Their performances reflect those differences but do not clash. Yusuke is a child and has yet to learn how to lie; Takeshi is a master and can do nothing but tell the truth. Like sweet and sour pork (yes, yes, I know that's a Chinese speciality and this is a Japanese film) they confirm and contradict everything the other does in such a way that you can't imagine either without the other.
Kikujiro is as original as a generic film can be. It's an unlikely construct for its genre but that just makes it all the more interesting. There are many things to be found within.
M (Adult themes)
121 minutes (2:01 hours)
Film: 23 May 2001
Takeshi Kitano