There is a THICK line between fine art and Cinema, Beat Takeshi somehow manages to blur that line. In a story, which incidentally if Miyazaki(Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away) were to have directed, HE too would have chosen a child as the center point. This is a film about a violent man doing a SWEET deed if you will, Sentenced by his take charge wife to take the boy to see his mother who has abandoned him for a new life in the country...THAT is pretty much the story. That and the adventures that follow. BUT the beauty of Mr. Kitano is his direction, I see equal parts Antonioni, Oshima, and Kurosawa in his direction and of course his own personal style. This is a long movie but you WILL find yourself swept into by it's poetic violence. Incidentally Jo Hisaishi who has scored a few of Mr. Kitano's films and Most if not all of Miyazaki's films, didn't score this one, and although the music in this film is great for the film I did wonder what feeling a Hisaishi score might evoke. I do hope that one day Mr. Kitano might acknowledge his influences more enthusiastically, then and only then will WE allow his artistic vision to recieve the praise it so justly deserves.

Any idiot can make a huge "moving" drama featuring the biggest name stars in Hollywood and spending one hundred million in the process, which remains a single thinking, plotless film. It is very rare when any of these films will be innovative, or contain real human emotion. In Kikujiro No Natsu, we take an actor, "Beat" Takeshi Kitano, one of the most well known actors in Japan, but who no one knows in America, obviously because Americans think their film industry is the only one in the world. Kitano, known best for his tough guy action roles, plays Mr.Kikujiro, a man who befriends a little boy named Masao, who wants to travel across Japan, to find his mother whom he has never met. Kikujiro winds up blowing all of he and the boy's money gambling, so they are reduced to walking and hitch hiking. Along the way, Kikujiro and Masao meet an unforgettable cast of characters who all put up with Kikujiro's usually rude but well meant attitude to try and keep the young Masao happy. This film is a great road trip movie, and on top of that, a great movie period. It is filled with comedy, sadness, downfall, and redemption to keep you entertained, and very well moved. It is a beautifully directed and shot film, which is a four star winner, and how it never got any oscar recognition is beyond me. If you have grown up without much presence from your parents as I did, you will really connect with this film. It is extrodinarily beautiful. The Japanese and American senses of humour are so contrast, that very few Americans, unless they are of Japanese descent or have spent time in Japan, or have some idea of Japanese culture, will most likely not understand the comedy in this film. However, if you have a single brain cell in your head, and understand that it is a different form of humour, this is a must see.

It's rare that I am moved by a movie as heavily as Kikujiro moved me when I saw it at the Miami Film Festival (twice, and it was even more powerful the second time) . I saw it at a press screening and I was charmed-- bewitched by the magic of Takeshi Kitano. He is a marvelous talent in movie making. It's so important that he edits his movies so expertly. He knows how to let the camera linger. His characters say so much without uttering a word. The movie is divided into nine chapters from the child's summer journal. At first I thought the eighth chapter went on too long, but upon my second viewing I saw the poetry of this movie. Just like poems use repetition to drive home a point, so does this movie. Kitano paints in broad strokes, he doesn't let you miss a single thing. Where an American filmmaker would get annoying in his repetition, Kitano creates a beautiful song. The music of the soundtrack is perfectly woven into the visual refrains. This is a movie of meditation, of reflection. It's more than a night at the cinema. You go to a movie like this to be rejuvinated. It's the kind of movie that can quench your thirst and curb your hunger.

KIKUJIRO is Kitano's NORTH BY NORTHWEST, a hugely enjoyable, almost parodic precis of a mighty oeuvre - we have the shy young protagonist and his violently unstable father figure from BOILING POINT; the disjunction of sentimental music and violent imagery from VIOLENT COP; the beachgames idyll, suspended in time and place, from SONATINE; echoes of KIDS' RETURN, such as the two tapdancers; the devastating intrusion of mental fragility from HANA-BI.

Of course, NORTH BY NORTHWEST is a masterpiece; KIKUJIRO, for all its many merits, isn't quite. The first half, detailing the quest of an incongruous pair - diffident, lonely boy who lives in his imagination, abandoned by his parents; and abruptly grouchy, middle-aged, henpecked husband search for former's mother - is full of great Kitano things, but seems to me a touch manipulative; the how-can-you-resist-it stoicism of the eternally disappointed boy; the swathes of romantic music that are sometimes undermined, but not always; the trying-a-bit-too-hard performance of Kitano himself, managing to mug shamelessly while retaining a rigorously deadpan demeanour (nevertheless, he has never been funnier, ) .

Like I say, though, it's full of good things, avoiding the blatant sentimentality of CENTRAL STATION or THE STRAIGHT STORY (KIKUJIRO is a film which is anything but straight - it begins with repeated shots of Masao crossing roads, bridges etc, as if signalling some kind of progress will be achieved, from childhood to maturity or something, but Kitano's subtle way with flashbacks means he, and we, are constantly going around in circles) .

This is very much a boys' film; not in the sense of startling violence or macho posturing (this is a Kitano film full of day-glo and angel bells) , but in its fantasy. The quest is a search for a woman, the mother (Kikujiro's also) , that first, perhaps stifling, experience we all have of life. The quest, therefore, might be seen as a return to the womb. But it fails halfway through, where a Hollywood movie (like THE STRAIGHT STORY) would end. The best stuff is still to come; the end of the journey (the woman) is made irrelevant. The quest is also an escape for Kikujiro from his permanently disapproving wife, back into a childhood where he is bully, in control; the temporary commune the pair set up is all-male.

To accuse Kitano of misogyny would be absurd; the film is shot through with the child's sensibility as expertly as Stephen Dedalus' in Joyce's 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' (we are watching, after all, Masao's snapshots) . This is a boy who early in the film stands tiny, alone, in a huge all-weather because nobody bothered to tell him about the suspension of summer soccer practice. In the corresponding scene near the end, he is no longer alone, chased on the pitch by his friends.

The linearity of the film is constantly disrupted, and finally abandoned after the quest fails - Masao is a child, after all, and must be entertained; and so we stop for entertainments, jugglers, human robots, funfairs. There is even the sense that Kikujiro's erratic irascability is all just a show for Masao, his mishaps as ritualised as performances - like a cartoon, he emerges unscathed from his very physical misadventures. This is crystallised in the glorious second half, where Kikujiro/Kitano, director of entertainments, struggles to keep the child constantly amused - this is as joyous as 90s cinema got, an affirmation of imagination, friendship and play. But absolutely no women.

There is a lingering feeling of traditionalism in these gestures. Although Masao dresses like his American equivalent, and lives in hyperWestern Tokyo, Western culture doesn't intrude very much in his life. He doesn't watch TV or collect Pokemon cards. In the opening sequence, when we see him wandering about Tokyo, we see him framed against ancient Japanese signifiers, temples, lamps, the equivalent of those headless seaside cartoons you see in Brighton, etc. Further, KIKUJIRO is shot through with fantasy, dreams, hallucination, and the most astonishing, otherworldly colour, and these are always heightening and making absurd the film's realism - the recurring shots of Masao sleeping, and the unsignalled shift in time, suggest the events exist as much in Masao's head as actually happening. But his subjectivity is highly ritual, stylised, like Japanese theatre, as if he is some kind of unconscious receptacle for a vanishing culture. (And, they always seem to have a spare pot of make-up handy)

For all its comedy, its variety, its humanity, its sense of the preposterous, KIKUJIRO is one of Kitano's saddest films. Although connections are formed in this eerily underpopulated Japan, the overriding sense of arbitrary fate and violence, of the increasing selfishness and soullessness of modern life, are painfully apparent. Curiously, Kitano's most open film in terms of space, is his least expansive in terms of thematics and effect - the compressions of genre seem to suit him best. This is still one of the best films of the year, as a middling film from the world's greatest living director must be. The Kitano style is awesomely confident, his unemotional, uncluttered, static framing, his comic editing and ellipses, his unobtrusive way of revealing emotion through landscape.