Taken at face value, Takeshi Kitano’s Outrage is a perfectly satisfying crime movie. The storytelling is terse and efficient, presenting one exciting standoff after another, and there are enough weird jokes and character turns to keep it from getting monotonous. The story itself, about warring yakuza clans familiar from hundreds of other films, is intentionally slim. Yet Kitano approaches the material like an ace jazz musician riffing on an old standard, constructing entire scenes around a funky camera setup, a deadpan punch line, or an ingenious sound cue.
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But is that even possible? The central joke of the autobiographical trilogy is that Kitano can never step outside the shadow of his own celebrity. First rising to fame in the 70s as half of a stand-up comedy duo called the Two Beats (he continues to use his comedy stage name, Beat Takeshi, as his acting credit), Kitano went on to become a successful TV host, action movie star, film director, and painter—in short, a Japanese icon. In contrast to his looming presence in the culture, Kitano’s onscreen persona tends to be modest and unaffected in the Buster Keaton tradition, qualities that extend to his directorial approach as well: he favors minimal dialogue, clean compositions, and linear camera movements. Kitano’s style often has the emotional directness of silent movies, and it’s proven well suited to character comedy (e.g., 1999’s Kikujiro) as well as old-fashioned tragedy (e.g., 1991’s A Scene at the Sea and 1997’s Fireworks, perhaps his finest film).
Kitano also recognizes the cost of so much self-examination. Satirizing his public persona one aspect at a time, the trilogy breaks down his identity until there’s little of the “real” Kitano left. Takeshis’ parodies his cultural celebrity through the imagined story of a pathetic double, an aspiring middle-aged actor named Mr. Takeshi who moonlights as a convenience store manager. Glory to the Filmmaker! mocks Kitano’s directorial career through a History of the World-style revue depicting his disastrous attempts to make a movie outside of his familiar style. Kitano stars in each of the movie parodies (which include a mawkish Yasujiro Ozu tribute and a ghost story in the fashion of The Grudge), and his failure to adapt his sad-sack comic persona becomes a hilarious running gag.
How does Outrage constitute a personal work? For one thing, it continues the theme of self-effacement begun by the creative destruction comedies. Kitano isn’t the star of the movie, but one player among an evenly weighted ensemble. Also, his character, Otomo, is neither a success nor a failure: he’s a midlevel crime boss who commands a few dozen men but still takes orders from superiors. His character may have the most fully realized dramatic arc in the movie—in the second half, he loses his position of authority and takes revenge on both his enemies and his bosses. But he’s no more sympathetic than any of the others.
Directed by Takeshi Kitano
