Alternate Best Actor 1997: Takeshi Kitano in Hana-bi

Takeshi Kitano did not receive an Oscar nomination for portraying Yoshitaka Nishi in Hana-bi.

 

Hana-Bi is a curious yet captivating mix of beauty and brutality, about a former police inspector dealing with two major tragedies in his life. 

 

The multi-talented Takeshi Kitano stars and directs this film, building an unusual tapestry around himself, and through himself as a tale about deep humanity and inhumanity often back to back or in the same scene. Although there is a tangible narrative going on Kitano directs the film with almost a stream of consciousness approach as the scenes move between each other with almost a dreamlike pace and manner. The idiosyncratic nature of this approach is perhaps most evident within Kitano's own performance, a performance that would be best described as austere. His typical state is that of a cold stare with typically any emotion obscured by a pair of ominous sunglasses that seem to detach his inspector from any more humanity. And in this sense, Kitano seems to craft the "badass" anti-hero of a more expected revenge thriller. Kitano's presence is of that calm cool, that killer's ease with a vicious ability to commit violent acts seemingly without a second thought in the scheme of things. His performance is much like his character, brutal and exact, though with a certain curiosity within that intensity. We learn that his character is defined by his wife dying from Leukemia and his former partner having been crippled from a botched police assignment. The brief scene setting up the latter seems most important as we see a different Nishi as he plans as a far more normal and grounded man. In fact in that scene Kitano portrays him as just a normal man planning, someone who isn't caught within this certain state the rest of the time. 

The rest of the time the performance largely is of this strict consistency of that cold stare, again usually obscure by sunglasses. Those moments of Nishi killing various Yakuza who try to get money from him or threaten him in a way. Mixed in with these rather wonderful moments that break from that. There are these brief moments where we get a different tone. Occasionally it is these playful scenes, although darkly so, like when he points a gun at a random passerby, before he goes to rob a bank, just as a joke and the sort of random demented yet comical manner that comes across Kitano's face is rather striking in this strange way. Even more remarkable though are the moments where we see Nishi with his wife as he takes her on a sort of vacation with his ill-gotten gains as she approaches her death. Kitano is quite wonderful in these moments with his wife, like when he is doing a card trick with her, as suddenly there is so much warmth between them, so much love, and there is such an earned sincere sweetness in Kitano's performance. You see a man who genuinely loves his wife, but more than that, you see the playfulness the two of them share together. They are genuinely fun together and you see what is a real loving couple here, even as these very sweet scenes come between scenes of such brutal violence. The most direct of this duplicity being a scene of Nishi's wife gather water for dead flowers while a man mocks her, leading Nishi to brutalize that man without mercy. 

As much as one can label this a "director's film" where this performance is by the director, I have to say I found myself transfixed by what Kitano was doing here as a performance even if it is but a facet of his tapestry he is painting. The exactness of his performance here though is fascinating in that he manages to play in his performance what he is creating in this film, which is this extreme dynamic between love and hate, gentleness and violence, comedy and tragedy. Kitano's performance can completely switch from scene to scene in terms of what he is conveying in a given moment, yet what he is conveying never seems at odds with each other. This even as he portrays a calm sadism when brutalizing one gangster after another, yet that doesn't seem ill-fitting from the strange compassion he seems to show towards his moments of thinking of his partner or the greatest of affections for his wife. Kitano's performance succeeds in creating the sense of a man who basically is filled with emotions towards the one's he loves, a pulled in emotion that drains him, yet is filled with the opposite kind of emotion towards those he hates as intensely. Kitano's performance works in creating a man who basically is in this state of a kind of insanity. He's not within his mind in a way, he's detached from life as he fashions some final mission for himself, and in that Kitano's performance works as this strange kind of gliding along. This as he'll enjoy a random moment of violence, comedy, or of love with the same amount of ease. This is a strange performance, but one that wholly worked for me even though the beats are technically limited in terms of overall range. Yet every moment is striking in revealing these different distinct moments that define the character that his performance left still such an impression even within the limitation. It's a performance about punctuation, careful singular notes between rests, and while that may handicap a typical performance, there is something about Kitano's presence here that overrides such considerations. Kitano makes Nishi's this one of a kind mix of the most extreme emotions, and a most powerful portrait of a man with a most unusual mix of brutal inhumanity and profound humanity.