VIOLENT COP Starring Takeshi Kitano, Maiko Kawakami. Directed by Takeshi Kitano. Category III. In Japanese with English and Chinese subtitles. Showing at the Arts Centre In the past few years Japanese actor-director 'Beat' Takeshi Kitano has emerged as a powerful force in world cinema. His most recent film, the hard and intense police story Hana-bi, won the Golden Lion at Venice this year, while his semi-surreal yakuza movie Sonatine has been acclaimed wherever it has been shown.
Violent Cop, which has a limited release at the Arts Centre this month, and was Kitano's 1989 debut, serves as a blueprint for his later movies. Kitano stepped in to direct the film when the original director resigned, thus initiating a series of movies that oscillate between grim violence and serenity.
On the surface, Violent Cop is a cops-versus-yakuza movie, but before we get to that we should talk a little about the style that has marked Kitano out as a movie original.
It is a rhythm thing. Usually, movies work gradually towards peaks of emotion, and then have a big conflict to resolve the situation and make us all feel better afterwards.
Kitano, who also edits his films, has a different approach. He chooses to move straight from moments of incredible tranquillity to moments of extreme violence with no build-up, something that can come as a shock to the unwary viewer. Kitano's violence usually comes from nowhere and evaporates as quickly as it begins.
Kitano brings it off because his characters are always so internalised, so intense we have no difficulty in believing their leaps into action.
Nor should we: violence in real life, unfortunately, seems to hit when it is least expected and quickly disappears into a bloody insignificance. We'll leave the gradual winding up of the emotions to romantics such as John Woo and Sam Peckinpah, thank you very much.