Movies: Kikujiro

Kikujiro's not anyone's idea of a model father, or even a competent criminal. He blows most of the kid's money at the bicycle races, berating him because he can't pick winners, and then the two of them start hitchhiking and grabbing rides where they can. This leads to one of the movie's most distracting scenes, where a child molester tries to get the boy to drop his pants — and Kikujiro steps in, does so, and then shouts, "All right, now what, smart guy?" Eventually we find that Kikujiro has lost his own mother as well, which is supposed to create a bond between the boy and the man — but the bond is more stated than sensed, and we wind up with a movie that gets trapped inside genre conventions rather than exploding them. The final fourth of the film really gets stuck in neutral; it's Kikujiro, the boy, a pair of bikers, and a hippie-poet type all horsing around on the beach, and while it's meant to be bucolic and paradisiacal it's just slow, slow, slow.

Kitano is a gifted and versatile actor, and his portrayal of Kikujiro is worth seeing. So much worth seeing, in fact, that I wanted him to inhabit a better movie, one in which his talents were more aptly exploited. This isn't to say Kikujiro is a total misfire — there are many funny and well-sustained sequences throughout, including a longish interlude at a bus stop that could have been a short movie unto itself. Kitano also loads the movie with many of his signature touches — he shows the aftermath of something as a way of getting a laugh, and for the most part it works. But there's too little and it's examined not sharply enough, and in the end it's a recapitulation of precisely the kinds of sentimental tearjerkers that Kitano himself professes to hate. Why, then, did he make one? To prove he could? There are worse reasons to make a film, I guess.