Let’s talk about Takeshi Kitano. With the nickname ‘Beat’ Takeshi, he became known around the world as the creator and host of the legendary television program ‘Takeshi’s Castle’, renamed in Spain ‘Yellow humour’ -in short: Japanese people getting slapped-, and then became an author revered by cinephiles after directing masterful films about yakuzas such as ‘Sonatine’ (1993) and above all as ‘Fire flowers’ (1996), which gave him the Golden Lion in the Venice Film Festival. Since then, Kitano has repeatedly used his cinema to unite these two artistic facets, comedy and ultraviolence, But perhaps he has never done so as effectively as in the film he has just presented out of competition at the Mostra.
During its first half, ‘Broken Rage’ It is a criminal intrigue starring a hitman who is forced to collaborate with the police to put an end to a gang of mobsters. In the second, it takes an unexpected turn and becomes a self-parody which retells the same story using incredibly accurate humour and a great deal of willingness to make fun of the different identities that its author has adopted in his work as an actor over the decades. The result is 60 minutes of footage that silences the mouths of all those who gave up on the Japanese director and is capable of causing even the most hieratic viewer to burst into fits of uncontrollable laughter, and the kind of reaction film for which only one word is appropriate: thank you.
Love and cheap clothes
First of the two films nominated for the Golden Lion presented on the last competitive day of the festival, ‘Love’ It is the third installment of the trilogy by Norwegian Dag Johan Hauderug has dedicated to the sex, dreams and love. Highly evocative of the cinema of Éric Rohmer, it is structured as a succession of juicy conversations between friends, between lovers, between coworkers and between doctors and patients in which topics such as: adultery, cancer, cruising and anal sex. His greatest asset is his naturalness and aversion to sensationalism when dealing with these issues; his biggest drawback is his excessive neatness and kindness when portraying his characters, and his strange insistence on linking his own civilized and progressive attitude to the history, psychology and even geology of Norway.
Also the new movie of Wang Bing puts Closing a trilogySpecifically, ‘Youth: Homecoming’ is the final installment of the series that the acclaimed Chinese documentary maker has dedicated to several of the hundreds of thousands of young people who They work 15 hours a day in a textile industry hub called Zhili City, crammed into mammoth concrete blocksn where they surround them tons of cheap clothes and junk. If the first film in the trilogy reduced these protagonists to the condition of mere cogs in a relentless productive machine, here Bing devotes a good part of the film to watching them play cards, share secrets, enjoy group dinners, exchange loving gestures, visit relatives on New Year’s Eve and even get married. In other words, he puts a face to the people whose work is hidden behind cheap clothes, and who end up being the ones who pay the highest price for them.
