The online film journal I run with a few great guys, Projectorhead just grew a blog of its own. You can visit the subsidiary branch of the magazine here: projectorhead.in/blog. I will, over time, syndicate a few of my posts there, here. The first is on a recent great film I saw at the Mumbai Film Festival (I originally made the 1600 kilometers long journey to watch a restored print of Once Upon a Time in America, but as it turned out, the house was declared full. It was full, but of empty seats, but that's a story for another day). Here,
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| Outrage Beyond (2012) / Takeshi Kitano |
2010’s
Outrage features as one of its final
sequences a neck-snappin’ execution, the method of which lends itself
graciously to Kitano’s perfectly perpendicular, two-dimensional, side-scrolling
video game manner of composing and then staging a shot – as the character
drives his car further towards the right end of the frame-proscenium, a chain
tied to a singular metal contraption present in the left half of the screen
snaps tightly, thereby resulting in inarguably agonizing murder. The right half
of the image is high-strung by the left. While this is, in the overall scheme,
merely another act of violence in a long series of such acts that have preceded
it (and will, needless to say, follow it), it is perhaps the only one which
includes within itself the room to accommodate sympathy – in the scene that
precedes the execution, the murdered character is shown to make love to his
girlfriend (who will die as collateral damage in a bullet siege aimed at her
lover) and as such, is deemed to be the only functional human being in a melee
of programmed and practiced upholders of abstractions like clan loyalty, honour
and personal prestige. His eventual death in the car therefore renders the
vehicle an entirely human object, the container of a now subdued human heart. Outrage Beyond begins with the image of
a similar vehicle being retrieved from within the ocean (the ocean and its
shore are often points of culmination in a Kitano film; it is interesting that
this film begins with it) – the image
of this piece of soggy, dripping metal strung up by an invisible crane in the
middle of the screen is a purely industrial one. It calls into mind a very
similar image from Louis Malle’s 1973 documentary, Human, Too Human, a film about modern vehicle manufacturing industry
and the coldness of the whole arrangement. In Outrage Beyond, the title of the film supers in large red serif
font over this image of the car – it is the perfect manner in which to begin a
sequel, with the notion that time (in-movie time and real-world time between
the first film and the sequel) has rendered cinders of old memories frigid and
the human car at the end of the first installment meaningless material at the
beginning of the second.
I
presume that very few film directors in the world can afford the luxury to end
the film the manner in which Takeshi Kitano ends his latest. Kitano uses the
entire duration of the film (as well as that of the preceding installment) to
set up a large situation of warring gangs trying to gain control over Tokyo, but
instead of a large payoff at the end (‘101 Ways To Murder’), Kitano’s Otomo
pumps a bullet or two into Kataoka (the policeman and a big jerk, the real villain
of the piece) and then, as the recently dead slumps to the ground, looks over
his body in a low-angle that is as much the point-of-the-view of the murdered,
as it is of the audience members whose collective complacent expectations of the
film Kitano’s just taken a piss over. With this final scene, Kitano brings to
culmination not merely a power conflict or a narrative problem, but also a
certain tradition in the gangster-rivalry film. Instead of bothering with the
usuals: dude egos, ambitions of vulgar power, hierarchical conspiracies, loyalty
to clans and a world-ending final montage of individual deaths, Otomo
eliminates the very engine that drives the giant genre-mechanism – the
character who schemes to setup one gang against the other and enjoy the show as
they destroy each other. In essence, Outrage
Beyond exists first and foremost as a latter day meditation on the common
tropes of the gangster film, their inevitable redundancy (someone gets to the
top, other wants his position, so on and so forth) and eventually, through this
final sequence, their defeat.
Such
contemplative audacity is resident not only in this aforementioned scene, but
throughout the film; because if Outrage Beyond
is anything, it is not a yakuza film,
but a post-yakuza film. A sustained
atmosphere of a world coming to a somber end seems to permeate through the
film, in that, the sedate gliding track-ins that open almost each scene, the
tired medium frontal close-ups that its characters populate, the absence of any
real soundtrack and character conversations that contain more meaningless
mumbling than wisecracks seem to suggest that if the first film was the party,
the second’s just the hangover. In that, it employs its duration to not ‘up the
stakes’ in the manner of a blockbuster Hollywood sequel or create a cutesy
wrap-up of the casual barbarism and haemo-shower-variety show resident in the
first film, but instead, take the gangster film and volunteer that really, because
the gangster film is inevitably driven by a hunger for power, no conclusion is
possible because as long as there is a hierarchy, there will be those who are
actually powerful and those who wish they were instead. Therefore, the only
real end is to murder the agent (in this case, the policeman) that induces
entropy into a stable system and through this, preserve the status quo. So even
as there are many shootouts close to the end, Kitano’s big point remains to
make them seem like a stuck record, playing itself endlessly into an infinite loop
of absolute pointlessness. These shootouts are so many that eventually, Kitano
manages to leak the human possibility out of them (as Michael Mann tells us,
even gangster takedowns involve human death) because as they keep going on, you
don’t even know who’s dying and who’s killin’ – I suspect Kitano even got the
same extras to play roles on either side in successive sequences.
As
such, Kitano cleverly reduces the gangster universe inside his film –
specifically the yakuza universe to
an anachronistic setting, a fascist setup run inside a world that really has
moved on from such adherence to empty symbols. It is notable that unlike the
first installment, the sequel doesn’t feature a single real interaction between
the habitants of the gangster universe with those of the world outside – there are
no wives, girlfriends, children or mothers – it is as if these gang members
live in a giant bubble of delusion by themselves. They seem to possess an
enormous amount of power (which is why, the problems), but its application
seems to effect no one but those in their peer group. Kitano concerns himself
with constructing therefore a universe which projects its energy externally (by
becoming a social concern or public enemies) but internally; it wouldn’t be a
surprise if the final twist is that they exist on an island far from the coast
of Japan. Kitano’s piece-by-piece takedown of the yakuza world, of which he has now been a cinematic ambassador for
over two decades now, is very interesting – he reduces it to a universe
obsessed with hollow symbols and their pursuit; his character Otomo is the enfant terrible who no one likes because
well, he could care less. He talks down to ‘seniors’ in the organization,
refuses to take orders and has no interest in setting up his own crime-family.
In this, Outrage Beyond is closest
not to other gangster films, including a few made by Kitano himself, but to the
twin jidaegeki dramas of Masaki
Kobayashi – Hara-Kiri and Samurai Rebellion, where characters (or
as in the case of Outrage Beyond, a
single character) enters a state of rebellion against a system built entirely
on the sustenance of illogical symbols, the sort of which Kitano reduces the yakuza existence to – seasonal gifts,
tattoos (a character, while emphasizing the undeserved reputation of a peer
laments, ‘He doesn’t even have the correct tattoos’), chopped pinky fingers,
suited attire (the henchmen wear black suits, the bosses can choose their
sartor and such.
Kitano
then takes to evaluating his own ‘violent guy’ persona – if Outrage Beyond is a great film, it is
because he is interested not in creating another manifestation of his gangster
persona, but an old-man’s ‘looking back at it’ introspection of it. When the
policeman character informs him in prison of an impending parole and encourages
him to join the yakuza setup again
(again, to induce chaos into a stable setup and to get them fighting again),
Kitano replies, ‘I am too old for this shit.’ And it’s clever, because as he
pulls off his private Gran Torino with
it, it seems to be a message similar to the one inherent in Seijun Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter, where the director uses
his lead character to mouth a message of dissent to the studio that asks him to
keep making the same type of film; explaining his predicament to another character,
the drifter exclaims: ‘I keep trying to move on, but they keep asking me to
come back.’ With Outrage Beyond,
Kitano conducts some Tokyo Driftin’ of his own.
