‘Hana-bi’, directed by Takeshi Kitano in 1997, is a Japanese crime drama starring Kitano as Yoshitaka Nishi, a retired detective. Nishi was forced into retirement after a violent incident that lead to the deaths of two of his colleagues and the injury of others. Without a job and struggling to care for this sick wife, Nishi finds himself mixing with gangsters to get the money he needs. Through the film he meets with his ex-colleagues who are injured following the incident that resulted in his losing his job. He takes extreme measures to ensure they have what they desire which results in him being hunted by both the gangsters and the police. It’s a violent fun with a dark, mordant sense of humour, stemming mostly from a deadpan ironic performance by Takeshi Kitano. For all the kinetic gunfights and painfully explicit fighting, the film has a slow pace, charting Nishi’s decent into corruption in a measured and careful way. There is also a curious hint of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s ‘Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain’ here are well in the way that Nishi is driven to extremes to make his friends wishes come true. For all the violence, there is a strange innocence at the heart of this film, a sweetness that comes from the simple drive of Nishi and from the languid pace that Kitano employs in the telling of his story.

Would I recommend it? Yes – it’s a complex film: a mixture of energetic violence and touching personal relationships. Watch in a weird double bill with ‘Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain’.