A virtual companion piece to Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s The Puppetmaster, Sai’s epic fresco uses the biography of one man as a key to an entire social history. Kim Shun-Pei emigrates from Jeju Island in Korea (a Japanese colony at the time) to Osaka as a young man in 1923. A lifelong fear of poverty meshes with his compulsive womanising and his capacity for violence to make him a monster as he moves from initial success with a fish-cake business to heading a small criminal empire as a loan shark.
Sai’s film (based on a factual novel by Korean writer Yan So-Gil, also the author behind All Under the Moon) is a brilliantly staged and acted recreation of a vanished community, but it raises difficult questions about Korean-Japanese identity. Is Kim (a defining performance by ‘Beat’ Takeshi) a Darwinian product of his environment? Or a psychopath who’s able to flourish in this environment?
- Director
- Sai Yoichi
- Country of production
- Japan
- Year
- 2004
- Festival Edition
- IFFR 2010
- Length
- 144'
- Medium
- 35mm
- Original title
- Chi to hone
- Language
- Japanese
- Producer
- Nozomu Enoki
- Production Company
- Office Kitano Inc
- Sales
- Celluloid Dreams
- Screenplay
- Sai Yoichi, based on a novel by Yan So-Gil
- Cinematography
- Hamada Takeshi
- Editor
- Okuhara Yoshiyuki
- Production Design
- Tsuyuki Emiko, Isomi Toshihiro
- Sound Design
- Susumu Take
- Music
- Iwashiro Taro
- Cast
- Kitano Takeshi