KITANO, THREE MOVEMENTS

The son of a house painter and a factory worker. Golden Lion, Silver Lion, Knights of the Arts and Letters, Legion of Honor. Director, actor, painter, poet.T akeshi Kitano is the total artist of a certain Japan. Yakuzas, family men, children, compose a cinema of absence.

Designer Yohji Yamamoto tells it thus:

“Two padded kimonos, one for a woman and one for a man, were made using Yuzen dyeing by Chiso, an old Kyoto Yuzen company formed in the 16th century. They cost more than 10 million yen. I paid for everything myself. But my relationship with Takeshi is not about money, but a friendship between two men. It is a spirit of generosity and chivalry. And thus, “Dolls” was released in 2002. Although it did not set a box-office record, it is apparently being used in art schools around the world as a teaching tool for the use of color. It holds important memories for me as well.”

Dolls draws its inspiration from the japanese bunraku theater: giant puppets playing the four seasons of endless love. Kitano grounds them:

“When I was still an aspiring actor in Asakusa, I once saw a man and a woman tied together by a rope. The locals called them ‘wandering beggars’. There were a lot of rumors about them, but nobody really knew how they had become vagrants. The vision of the wandering beggars has remained engraved in my memory, and I have always wanted to make a film with characters like them.”

It is however as a comic, then as a comedian that Kitano’s career began: he plays the sergeant to David Bowie’s imprisoned colonel in Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, a policeman or a killer in the films of Ryūchi Takamori or Yōjirō Takit. It is by the serendipity of an illness that he becomes a director, replacing one in an emergency. From his days as a comic, he keeps the nickname of his duo: the manzai “The Two Beats” became “Beat Takeshi”.

Directing fits his taste for retreat. Kitano cauterizes emotion, narrows down narration, streamlines dialogue. Hoarse voice, tight lips: in Sonatine, his character commits suicide in a rictus. His countenance and clothes then become the way to read him. In Violent Cop, a grey, white, and black tweedwoolen fabric, more or less rustic, woven with multicolored blazer with low notch lapels grows tattered from chase to chase; in Boiling Point, a flowered shirt and double-striped jacket undo the character’s coldness; in Sonatine, a white shirt.

Yamamoto designs the costumes for three of his films:

for Brother – a black three-button with wide volumes, a camp-collar white shirt. for Dolls – boiled woolcontinuous growth fiber of animal origin (alpaca, camel, Kas, a fine synthetic prussian blue shirt.

for Takeshis’ – a slim black suit with frank shoulders, an oliver rain poncho.

In Hana-Bi, Brother, Takeshis’, and on the red carpet, Kitano wears sunglasses inspired by those of the anarchist Peter Kropotkin.

In his autobiography, My Dear Bomb, Yohji Yamamoto writes: “In the places where he wants a message to get across, he intentionally does not insert that message.”