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A speared wrasse over the musical title heralds a deeply mysterious film. Les truands sont fatigués (Truffaut on Touchez pas au Grisbi), the Yakuza enforcer (Takeshi Kitano) ponders retirement between shootings and stompings. "We've been living the hard life too long." (Absorbed in doleful thought, he loses track of how long a captive's been held underwater, the lifeless figure hoisted out by a crane receives a characteristic shrug.) The gang war needs a mediator, he's saddled with callow minions and sent to an Okinawa beach in the wake of an ambush. A hoodlum's involuntary holiday, "no kindergarten picnic," the kind of ineffable Kitano arrangement that turns Shinoda's Pale Flower into Tati's Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot. "Not being afraid of killing people means not being afraid of killing yourself, right?" Coastal limbo, underworld vaudeville. Mooks in floral shirts, just a bit of Russian roulette to break up the boredom, what else is there to do for brutal men forced to bond with each other? Games, pranks, performances figure in these chunks of lyrical time-wasting, a dreamy tranquility abruptly punctuated by bloodletting—bullets like firecrackers at a happy-hour skirmish, wounds like faucets trickling in the sand. The lone moll (Aya Kokumai) tags along after being inadvertently saved from rape, the ephemeral rain that leaves the henchmen stranded with shampoo also soaks her tank top. "Indecent exposure is fun." Paper dolls and Roman candles, the red Frisbee that briefly eclipses the cobalt sky, the placid ocean blackened by smoke from an exploded car. The peace offering of popsicles, denied: "My stomach still hurts from when you stabbed me." The climactic slaughter is a distant light show (cf. Wellman's Yellow Sky), followed by a landscape where the parting shot forms "coolly as a tree or a flower," as the poetess would say. With Tetsu Watanabe, Masanobu Katsumura, Susumu Terajima, Ren Osugi, Tonbo Zushi, Kenichi Yajima, and Eiji Minakata.
--- Fernando F. Croce |