Beat Takeshi’s SONATINE, a movie about gangsters playing on the beach and ennui
Murakawa is a mid-level yakuza boss but he could be anybody. He has no physical presence. He stares blankly into the distance when no one is looking and shrugs off the daily toils of his occupation as if he were an average nine to five office worker. Aside from the tattoos on his back, there is little to remind us that he’s a gangster, a killer. Even when Murakawa drowns a mahjong parlor owner who he dangles from a crane, he does it joylessly, with a hint of boredom.
“Maybe you’re too rich for this job,” one of his underlings tells him.
But Murakawa isn’t too rich. He’s burnt out. So burnt out that he barely bats an eye when his own boss, an old man who’s equally as bored but much more ambitious, sends him on an errand in Okinawa that is more of an exile than a necessary mission. Murakawa knows that behind his superior’s blank expression, there’s an intent to control and kill. And yet he and his underlings board a flight that throws them straight into a conflict they have no stakes in. Their objective: make peace between two warring Okinawan yakuza gangs. This peace, the group quickly learns, is a mirage
The film delivers a feint, making us believe that the story that is about to unfold is a bloodbath and instead gives the viewer a second act that is more hangout film than gangster movie. Murakawa, his group, and their Okinawan guides hide from the conflict in a remote beach house after a gruesome attack on their makeshift headquarters. Here they dance, they play frisbee, they pantomime the violence and trauma etched into them. In one visually sumptuous scene, they shoot fireworks at each other at night in a pretend war that comes to a close when Murakawa unloads his real gun on the other side with a laugh, a presage of things to come.
Another scene, the film’s most famous, involves a game of Russian roulette. Ryoji, a yakuza from Okinawa, and Ken, one of Murakawa’s men from Tokyo, shoot cans off of each other’s head in front of the ocean. Murakawa walks over to them, grabs the gun, and empties the chamber leaving one bullet. They play rock, paper, scissors and whoever loses Murakawa shoots. Eventually, there is only one shot left and Murakwa loses. To the horror of Ryoji and Ken, who know that there is a bullet still in the chamber, Murakawa puts the gun to his temple. He fires but doesn’t die, having removed the bullet with a sleight of hand. This is the underlying tension of the film. How long does it take for games to become deadly? How long can the film’s protagonist go through the motions of his chronic grind without wanting to destroy himself and everything around him? By the film’s bloody conclusion, we know.
There are so many things one can dissect in Sonatine: Murakawa’s relationship with an Okinawan woman he unwillingly saves from rape, the film’s deadpan camerawork in moments of brutality, Joe Hisaishi’s hauntingly sparse soundtrack, Takeshi Kitano’s minimalist acting method. But what sticks with me the most is the lack of style. Sonatine’s yakuza aren’t glamorized; they aren’t tragic heroes or picaresque villains. You give them a frisbee and they play. You give them a gun and they murder. It’s a reminder that the real men who do terrible things could be anybody.
