Chi To Hone (Blood and Bones)

2004
Directed by Yoichi Sai
Written by Yoichi Sai and Wui Sin Chong
Starring Takeshi Kitano

Chi To Hone carries an interesting backstory, one that would require a much longer examination than is possible here.  The film has been in the works for six years while Yoichi Sai waited for Takeshi Kitano to become available. Sai lives in Japan, but he's actually Korean, as are nearly all of the characters in Hone.  The story is loosely adapted from a biographical novel about the lives of an immigrant Korean family in Japan, both pre- and post-World War II.  Although the film is epic in it's scope, starting in 1923 and ending in 1984 and including an unusually large cast (for a Japanese drama), Hone still plays much like a higher budget version of a truncuated mini-series.  Without exception, every character is brushed past in the film's obsessive focus on Kitano's story, which, by the close of the film, has become so violently disturbing and upsetting that the amount of work that clearly went into the film is called into question.  Ignoring the lack of any real analysis or, for that matter, attention to the story of Korean immigrants in 20th century Japan, the film pays little care towards the family itself, choosing to give itself totally over to Kitano's larger than life Kim Shunpei.

What is also surprising is that none of it ends up mattering anyway.  As a story, Chi To Hone fails to clear any hurdles--the narrative is confusing and dull, which is putting it kindly at best.  As a film, it succeeds in being watchable soley because of Kitano's performance, which, if the production company had gotten any kind of distribution deal, would be long remembered as one of the starkest and most fascinating portrayal of sociopathy ever captured.  Unfortunately, the film is only available in most countries on a cheap DVD, and theatrical showings have not extended far beyond Japanese and Korean shores.  Kitano's work deserves better.  Never before, with the possible exception of the completely unwatchable Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, has an actor been so willing to be so bad.  Without a single attempt at facile psychoanaylsis (the sort of drivel that's destroyed every American film portrayal of evil) Kitano strides throughout this movie, beating and raping everything that comes into his path, expressing himself through nothing more than violence and hate.  At no point, from start to finish, is his Kim Shunpei anything more than a very evil human being: and that's what makes it even more brilliant--there is no attempt made by either filmmaker or star to excuse his behavior nor to turn into some exercise in Satanic demonizing.  Kim Shunpei, as Takashi portrays him, is a man through and through.  Although watching Chi To Hone is, at best, a tortourous experiement in what the viewer can tolerate, it's a darkly rewarding one.  Fiction as a medium loves to make scary people a joke, and it loves to exercise revenge on them as well: if anything, we should know that's not how it works.  As Chi To Hone expresses it, abusive fathers, rapists and all-around degenerates get away with it far more than the movies would have us believe.  It's unsettling, but it's unsettling because it's true, and raising a generation to believe that Morgan Freeman is going to bring us the evidence so Sam Waterson can deliver a great closing arguement will ill prepare them for the world outside the door.  In that fashion, Chi To Hone only needed to be a decent movie.  It wasn't--instead, it's a flawless performance by one of the worlds greatest living artists.

Comments

[Matt Hartwick]

It's not hard to understand why I'd like Takeshi Kitano to be my dad for a couple of months. Not ... not the kind of dad he was in B&B, but Father just the same. Whatever. I'm correct.
The copy on the back of the first Japanese release of the "Blood and Bones" DVD reads: "Do you savour exemplary savage carnal violence and create brutal training?" Poor sales on that one, for whatever reason.