Takeshis'
DIR Kitano Takeshi | Japan | 2005 | 108 min,
In Japanese with English Subtitles.
SHOWTIMES:
Sun. Oct. 2 | 9:45pm | VOG
Sun. Oct. 9 | 4:00pm | VOG
Reviewed by Loretta Sarah Todd
I want to be in a Kitano Takeshi film. You can be absurd and smart, you can improvise, and if you want to tap-dance (or maybe pow-wow?), Takeshi will let you.
In Takeshis’, Kitano plays both his celebrity alter-ego self, film and TV star "Beat" Takeshi, as well as a failed actor, also named Kitano Takeshi, who works in a convenience store and goes to auditions but seldom gets a role. As these two Takeshis intersect, we enter a world of doppelgangers, where time is no longer linear and dreams and fantasy are reality. The loser Takeshi imagines he is Beat Takeshi—and he is and he isn’t, as he wades deeper and deeper into his imagination and his desires.
Takeshis’ is buoyant with life and tap-dancing, filled with cinematic shoot-outs to rival cinematic shootouts, and highlights a taxicab ride along a road of dead bodies. The lively character of the film may be explained by realizing that Takeshis’ is a result of Takeshi’s interest in making a film called Fractals. Fractals come out of chaos theory; fractal geometry is a new language used to understand complex forms in nature. The term fractal was coined as recently as 1975, from the latin fractus or "broken". Before that, fractals were called monster curves.
Here is cinema that structures beyond cause and effect, beyond the three-acts and plot points. It is fractal, or string-theory, or perhaps chaos cinema; in any case, it is removed from the limits of the linear. In fact, Takeshi himself stated:
“The film can be solved using algebraic solution or factorization with x,y,z,_,_,even_, but there is one element which is logarithmic ellipsis, so there would be one thing which is unsolvable.”
And I love it, even if there are some corny moments. In addition to the fractals—or perhaps because of them—the director plays with cinema, as well as his image and persona. Takeshi “the loser” is literally a clown at times and has a groupie who waits outside his low-rent apartment each night to thank him for his work.
Of course, not everyone loves Takeshis’. There were boos at the Venice Film Festival—but perhaps that has more to do with our times, where some audiences want absolutes when in reality there are only relationships and monster curves.