The Beach Episode | Sonatine (1993) Review – With Eyes East
Directed by Takeshi Kitano
Starring Takeshi Kitano, Masanobu Katsumura, Aya Kokumai
It’s rare for a film to give the sense that we, the audience, are seeing the world through the director’s eyes. Typically, great direction serves the story, but in this case, the director may be the story, doubling as the lead actor. As his character Murakawa, Takeshi Kitano observes. Along with countless static shots of people standing by, sitting still, waiting, we look at a lot of Murakawa looking. More than that, Sonatine, like Kitano’s earlier film Boiling Point, moves to its own rhythm. Proceeding without a lot of dialogue, it establishes a unique language with what we see and when we see it. Often, what we see is a shocking instance of violence. For my money, Sonatine has the most effective jump scare in any non-horror movie. I practically leapt out of my seat. And yet, it’s also irreverent and tender, melancholy and affecting. It’s phenomenal.
Beware this plot synopsis, but it’s my theory that Sonatine is spoiler-proof, because it’s so much more about feeling than it is about knowing. Murakawa is a yakuza underboss dispatched to sunny Okinawa to mediate an alleged turf war between two other gangs. Even this close to the start of his directing career, Kitano plays a gangster ready for retirement (he’d already held several careers previous, including as host of Takeshi’s Castle and as a comedian with material I’d probably loathe), and so Murakawa reluctantly agrees to the assignment despite sensing danger. Once there, his team is attacked, forcing the survivors to hide out on the beach for several days while the bosses back home sort out the mess. In the meantime, the gangsters play sumo, pull pranks on each other (including a hilarious gag with pitfalls in the sand), and fool around with live ammunition.
It’s not quite a juxtaposition so much as a sense of dread. Specifically, it’s the feeling one has as a child when playtime is over. There’s something pitiable about a man repeatedly tossing a frisbee into the air as his gangster comrades watch from the sideline. This should ring familiar to Americans living in 2025, as once again the violence of our government’s turned inward, too, and we’re resolving or learning to appreciate the small moments of happiness amidst a broader chaos. Eventually, for Murakawa, it’ll be time, and suddenly, the pleasures of the genre are weighed with terrible stakes. More gunfights to come, meaning that friends and silly people will be discarded like so many before.
With the violence, I was reminded of the shooting deaths in The Godfather, which traded realism for ghastly spectacle. In Sonatine, too, a bullet to the head doesn’t immediately drop the body, as we wouldn’t get that haunting image of a man looking confused, with a bloody hole in his forehead. It’s all too strange to be boiled down to nihilism alone, though the film’s signature image is Murakawa holding a revolver to his head, and Kitano would admit later that his 1994 motor-scooter accident which paralyzed half his face was a suicide attempt. What ultimately wins out, the melancholy or the beauty? Is it even a contest to begin with?
Appreciating Sonatine admittedly feels like a badge of honor, given he’s one of those directors like David Cronenberg who was spurned by his home country and found an audience with French critics. I don’t imagine I would’ve liked Sonatine if I’d tried to watch it during my college-era movie rush. At that point, movies were meant to be studied and understood, rather than experienced. It’s also not like a standard yakuza movie, though that’s overused phraseology, isn’t it? Most westerns aren’t like the standard western, it seems. For reference, Kitano would make the Outrage trilogy of yakuza movies in the 2010s, all politics and bloodshed. Maybe I missed something, but he seems to have his career in reverse, with the traditional exercises coming after the deconstructions.
I never really talked about the Outrage movies on this site, nor Violent Cop or Boiling Point (which I loved), because I didn’t know how. This is where the French critics come in. Still, there are more easily deciphered pleasures in Sonatine. The beach makes for a naturally beautiful setting. Generally speaking, if I could time travel and live anywhere in the world, it would be in Japan in the 1990s. Special mention must be made of Joe Hisaishi, of course, the legendary composer who’s given us some of the greatest-ever movie scores (including Spirited Away, and Princess Mononoke especially). It’s a great and maybe telling pairing of composer to director, like giving voice to the beating heart beneath that stoic, staring face. Inscrutable but all-seeing.
Similar to Outrage, though, it was fun to see some familiar faces from Shin Godzilla — the all-stars of Japanese actors — including Tetsu Watanabe and the late Ren Osugi. And apparently, Kenichi Yajima, though I didn’t recognize him.
