From the very opening shot I had the strange sensation of having seen this film before, without being able to identify in my mind where or when. The film has an aesthetic which is unlike anything Western cinema ever aspires to. The mix of sentimentality and violence is jarring. Nishi is a hard-boiled cop who is also doing everything he can to share his last days with his dying wife in peace. The trouble is the yakuza are on his trail, believing he owes them money and they keep requiring him to mercilessly beat the shit out of someone else. At the same time, Nishi’s former partner, Horibe, has been left in a wheelchair following a shooting and is trying to find a reason to live through painting. (Imdb informs that these paintings were actually made by Kitano himself, following a near fatal motocycle accident in 1994.) The resultant film is a pot pourri of genre and tragedy, of colour and deadpan pacing. Even the edit is disorientating, with Nishi having flash forwards that intersperse the action, breaking it up, messing with the viewer’s mind. There are moments when this device feels like something Nolan might have stolen, cinema as a spinning vortex of time, without any of Nolan’s pretension. All of which marks Hana-Bi as a film that is curiously gentle, but insatiably violent all at the same time, a jagged combination that makes for disorientating viewing, even more so when one suspects that one has seen this all before, but cannot be completely confident that this is the case.
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