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To Live And Die in L.A. — and Tokyo

Takeshi Kitano’s Brother unites L.A. gangstas and Japanese yakuza

It seemed inevitable that Japanese director/actor/comedian Takeshi “Beat” Kitano would go Hollywood with both barrels blazing, and Brother doesn’t disappoint.

Kitano’s ice-cool, ultraviolent flicks have always rivaled his American blood brothers Sam Peckinpaugh and Quentin Tarantino in terms of flying lead. It was just a matter of when and how he would land in Tinsel Town. And more importantly, would Kitano tone down his tightly wound shoot ’em ups and temper his unabashed sentimentality? Would he fall for all the mod cons and adopt the conventions of mainstream American cinema?

Well, thankfully, the granite-faced Kitano doesn’t seem much altered by his first brush with overseas filmmaking. Brother, the director’s ninth film, and his first shot outside of Japan, shows that Kitano hasn’t watered down his bullet-riddled recipe with anything other than a refreshing splash of malt liquor, a veritable rainbow coalition of thugs, and some hard-boiled, and at times humorous, thoughts on the clash between Japanese and American cultures.

In fact, Brother is something of a bracing return to form for Kitano after his W.C. Fields-like turn in the sap-fest, Kikujiro. Brother finds him taking on some intriguing new themes, in addition to his usual concerns of mindful fatalism and multiple fatalities.

Brother shows its baleful sense of humor from the start. An ousted gangster from his yakuza brotherhood in Tokyo, Yamamoto (Beat Takeshi) arrives in LAX, where he’s picked up by a cabbie who offers to introduce him to some good-looking babes, then berates him when he realizes his passenger doesn’t speak English. The driver changes his tune when he gets a $100 tip from Yamamoto, who, like many Japanese, has to get a hang of the foreign idea of tipping.

After their palms are amply greased, the driver and the hotel bellboy can’t do enough for Yamamoto, but the yakuza only has one goal: to find his younger half-brother Ken (Claude Maki). Yamamoto eventually finds him, and discovers that he is a small-time drug dealer. It turns out, one of Ken’s homeys is Denny (Omar Epps), who had already gotten into a dustup with Yamamoto on the street his first day in L.A. After crashing into the yakuza hoodlum on the street, Denny made the mistake of threatening Yamamoto with violence, and ends up with a broken bottle in the eye. The bandaged Denny is immediately suspicious of Ken’s brother, until they start to bond over a few random gambling bouts and card games.

Soon, Yamamoto is back to his old tricks, killing off Ken’s supplier and a rival Chicano gang and building a small drug empire, with help from an accountant, Sugimoto (James Shigeta of Flower Drum Song). The homeboys trade their rundown digs for a tasteful loft straight out of the Pottery Barn catalog, turn in their baggy pants for Yohji Yamamoto suits, and build an alliance with a dangerous rival, Shirase, the Little Tokyo crime kingpin (Masaya Kato). But there are still some older evils to contend with — the Mafia.

The subsequent blood bath, interspersed with scenes of gangland murder and seppaku back in Tokyo, earned Brother an NC-17 rating. But with the exception of one false note, which was improvised by the otherwise excellent Epps, Brother translates Kitano’s style perfectly into an English-dominated American landscape. The camerawork remains as static and strictly composed as that of an Ozu film, although, unlike that polite observer of manners, Kitano uses that stasis as a shocking counterpoint to fierce, economical moments of extreme violence — or almost childlike humor. Downtown L.A.’s pawn shops and coffee shops stand in perfectly for the post-war concrete surfaces of Tokyo, and the Joshua trees of Palmdale substitute for Kitano’s beloved beaches, shot in refined, muted blue and gray tones by cinematographer Katsumi Yanagijima.

Brother’s most salient irony is that Kitano now finds himself in a truly ultraviolent landscape, a land of school shootings and serial killers — far from the more crime-free Japan. And as the writer, as well as lead actor, director and editor of the film, he casts himself as less tragic a figure than the lead characters in his other films. Instead, Kitano chooses a Wild West-style showdown, and a friendship with Epps for his Yamamoto character that goes beyond blood and nationalism. Maybe the family you create is all that can be counted on in the wide-open, wack-job spaces of a cruel new world.