Broken Rage: Monsieur Hulot's Hitman

Takeshi Kitano's films work so well not just because he's so good at balancing levity with sincerity, but because the way he balances them is so wonderfully subversive, always managing to find new ways to escape whatever expectations you might have of him or the genre landscape he's working in. With films like Hana-bi or Sonatine he finds ways to shatter preexisting images and replace them with something far more complex and fascinating, breaking down and reconstructing gangster myth and yakuza tropes with equal doses of humanity and comedy. Broken Rage really isn't so different from his lauded past works, only here he's far less interested in the latent existential tragedy of violence, instead taking his own familiar images and flipping them on their head into a bifurcated madcap farce that establishes its own set of rules just so it can transform on a dime from a traditional Kitano gangster film into a Jacques Tati-esque visual comedy of errors.

The first half of the film, which in total squeaks out just over an hour, is exactly what you might expect from Kitano doing his version of a hitman procedural. Kitano's aging and aggressively plain protagonist Mouse follows a rigid routine as a yakuza hit man, shuffling into a dusty and empty cafe every morning to receive an anonymous briefing on his target, executing a flawless and explosively violent hit, then returning to his humble, dim apartment to end the evening. Eventually, Mouse is arrested by Detectives Inoue and Fukuda (Tadanobu Asano and Nao Ômori, respectively), who offer him a deal to escape jail time - go undercover and infiltrate a local gang pushing drugs to gather evidence against them.

While this initial sequence plays out essentially as you might expect it to, even this straightforward procedural can't escape his edge of levity, the aging characters and clinical tone of it all presenting a grimy criminal underworld that's become as dispassionately capitalistic as the world around it. Hardened gang members showing up to work like they're clocking in for a shift at Ross, going through the motions of murder and drug manufacture like it's just another Monday. It's all been chewed up, spit out, and washed of all the glamor - perhaps Kitano's bleakest vision of criminal reality because it all seems so dreadfully dull.

The second half of the film, a sequence titled "SPIN OFF," is exactly the same as the first half - at least, in its larger narrative arc. The same story plays out once again, only now stripped of any and all sincerity, a full-on screwball comedy, a comedian making fun of his own arthouse tendencies with the silliest possible alternate take on every scene. Here Kitano essentially doubles the effect of his own comedy by presenting it in such harsh opposition to the expectations that had just been established, eventually creating a gleeful anticipation as you await the next way the film will manage to shift the perspective of it all. When most mainstream comedy has become little more than snarky quips and cheap gags, it's both immensely refreshing and increasingly hilarious to watch a master at work crafting a nonstop stream of wacky, madcap visual gags.

The once unremarkable Mouse, in the comedic element, becomes a bumbling delight, not unlike Jacques Tati's Hulot in the way he so affably finds himself in absurd scenarios and up to goofy hijinks. The madness also allows the rest of the ensemble to open up, with Asano in particular offering a brilliant comedic performance that includes a dizzying array of cinematic references. With the truncated runtime, Kitano really lets it all flow at full force, nearly every shot introducing a new joke, and often one that he knows exactly when to pull back out later for maximum effect. Arguably, this comedy of errors is another side of the same coin, showing violent criminals as utter buffoons to strip them of their cool exteriors, but it could just as well be Kitano earnestly trolling himself and his audience to laugh at his own cinematic predilections. Either way, it's a genuine riot that manages to poke fun at itself, the film industry at large, its own critics, and audience expectations without ever missing a beat. Kitano continues to be one of our finest filmmakers.