Takeshi Kitano

(On Cable TV, November 2020) There’s a stoic restraint to Fireworks that clearly helps make it a critical favourite—an overstuffed tale of a policeman turning to crime as his life implodes, it could have been executed with emotional histrionics, but deliberately chooses to go the other way and understate things until the somewhat grim end. In cinema history, commentators have noted that this choice was all the more surprising given that it was the film that helped writer-director Takeshi Kitano move away from his previous persona as comedian “Beat Takeshi” to a more serious filmmaking reputation. While Kitano denied the conscious influence, Fireworks certainly bring to mind the austere French school of cinema, along the lines of Melville and Bresson. It’s deliberate… and it won’t work for all audiences. At times, Fireworks seems intent on frustrating those used to a more conventional style: it obfuscates the timeline, skips over action beats and downplays everything until we’re left with a contemplative take on dramatic events. It does succeed at its ambitions, but those may not be the ones that viewers would expect—there’s a particularly perverse irony in how you could take the film’s plot summary, give it to another director, and end up with an action-packed crime movie. But that’s not the film that Fireworks tries to be.