Takeshi Kitano, l’imprévisible

Kitano Takeshi is a familiar figure to many festival visitors. All his features have been screened in Rotterdam and this year sees his latest film too, Kikujiro. Jean-Pierre Limosin has made several features but also portraits of directors such as Abbas Kiarostami and Alain Cavalier. For his Takeshi Kitano, l’imprévisible, he used the services of the internationally renowned film connoisseur Hasumi Shigehiko to question Kitano about his life and work. Several themes of Kitano’s films are looked at: the combination of cruelty and tenderness, the humour, the playfulness, the waywardness. This is illustrated by eloquent film fragments from Kitano’s oeuvre. Many of Kitano’s ideas turn out to have their roots in his youth. But what this film mainly shows is that Kitano is a unique phenomenon, largely because he has a superstar status in Japan as the TV comic ‘Beat Takeshi’. Kitano’s versatility – he is also painter, chronicler and humourist – is impressive, but it is largely in his feature films that his obsessions, originality and sensitivity take off. ‘Takeshi Kitano, the unpredictable’, is the justifiable title of this portrait of a film-maker whose whimsical oeuvre is dominated by a universally understandable humanism. (GjZ)