Kikujiro (1999)

The first minutes of Kikujiro (dir. Takeishi Kitano) perfectly illustrate what kind of movie this is. Cute music. A kid is running through a very matter-of-fact landscape. Is this a hallmark production or a Kore-eda inspired movie? This tensions is kept throughout the film, and in my opinion, its a tension that works extremely well. A kid lives with his grandmother in a small town. The kid is bored, and he wants to visit his mother. Strangely, one of grandmother's friends - a thug - promises to take him there. The friend, played by the director himself, is one of the most memorable characters I've seen on film for a long time. A social catastrophy, he offends everyone he sees, but somehow he has taken to the boy and tries to go through with his mission. Kikujiro turns out to be a roadmovie, a strange one, involving a paedophile, a well-behaved motorcycle gang and a string of mishaps and adventures. I love the film for several reasons, the major being its style: things just happen, as things happen in real life - but this is life from the beckettian angle. Conventional action is kept to a minimum. The magic here is that the events have no particular narrative intelligibility - we never know what kind of story this is or what kind of story it will develop into. I think I have seen one or two of Kitano's hard-boiled gangster movies. Kikujiro is miles from that. It's a sensitive little film that treats social life with a certain open-endedness and wonder that makes it one of the rare examples of film succeding in taking a child's perspective seriously, without enforcing an adult rationality or moral logic. This is an adorable movie and I hope I will get to re-watch it sometimes. Very few movies mix the creepy and the cute and the naturalistic in this way. The humor often works through situations that are not really funny, but rather scary or repulsive. --- But it is a little bit strange that I liked this film, taking in account the vanity with which the director shows off himself and his cinematic quirks. Well - I let myself be gulled into liking this one, perhaps against my better judgment.