Sonatine (1993)

Sonatine arrives from 1993, a decade before the cultural machinery that now greets every release would have known what to do with it. Takeshi Kitano directs himself as Murakawa, an aging yakuza dispatched to Okinawa on what he correctly suspects is a suicide assignment. The plot is a delivery mechanism for four scenes, by Kitano's own account, and the space between them fills with men playing children's games on a beach while the tide of their own extinction creeps in. It is a gangster film in which almost nothing gangster-like happens for long stretches, and then everything does, briefly and without ceremony.

A search for the markers of contemporary social consciousness finds a clean surface. The cast is Japanese because the film is set in Japan among Japanese gangsters. Miyuki, the only woman of consequence, exists as a rape victim and then as a quiet attachment to the man who shoots her attacker; the film grants her no interiority and asks for none. There is no racial argument, no environmental sermon, no critique of capital, no vocabulary of identity at all. Kitano is interested in fatalism, in the flat affect of a man who has already decided how this ends, and in the peculiar comedy of grown killers tossing frisbees.

To classify such a work is to feel the classification apparatus shrug. It lectures no one. It represents no one. It observes a man walking toward a gunshot he has been walking toward since the first frame. The Russian roulette sequence, the dream of the loaded chamber, the final drive to the shore: these are the film's argument, and the argument is that there is no argument. This is not a failing. It is a kind of integrity that the current moment, so eager to be told what to think, has largely misplaced.