Brother Oozes So Much Testosterone that It's a Wonder the Screen Doesn't Grow Stubble

Takeshi Kitano does more with less than any leading man in movies today. He writes and directs the stylized Japanese gangster pictures he stars in, and whatever else you might say about his work, you can't say that Kitano the filmmaker doesn't understand how to use his leading man.

He's rather small, yet he carries himself like a brute who spent a lifetime trying to come to grips with his own meaty hugeness. (Charles Bronson, a compact slab of macho who Kitano vaguely resembles, managed the same physical trick.) His face is inexpressive?or, to be fair, perhaps Kitano simply doesn't like telegraphing emotion; either way, he often photographs himself with his head down, eyes hidden behind sunglasses so that you can't tell quite what his character is thinking. His gangster characters move slowly, talk softly, react deliberately and spend inordinate amounts of time thinking and smoking?except when violence is called for, at which point they explode into vengeful fury. The violence is not photographed in an obviously analytical or expressive way; except for fleeting instances of slow motion, Kitano prefers his mayhem brief, painful and extremely ugly. A split instant after a violent act has been committed, one of two things typically happens: either the film cuts away or Kitano's character stops moving. And stillness returns.

This contradictory combination of qualities?stillness and rage?is stereotypically Japanese, and a case could be made for Kitano as a filmmaker who embraces, explores and enlarges his own culture's stereotypes. Actors and filmmakers from a variety of ethnic groups have done the same thing throughout movie history?often in hyperviolent gangster dramas, where Italian, Latino and black actors embrace hot-tempered stereotypes and explore them in the name of commerce or art. Kitano's gangster pictures try to satisfy both criteria.

The 53-year-old Kitano is a versatile performer whose resume includes stand-up comedy, poetry, fiction and painting, and he's played a number of different kinds of roles during his career; but it's his yakuza films?including Sonatine, Fireworks and Boiling Point?that made him an international art-house icon. He's thought of as a director whose films explore violence and manhood, but if you're not interested in that sort of thing, you can simply enjoy them as violent, manly movies. In this respect, Kitano is somewhat like Sam Peckinpah, Walter Hill and John Woo?meaning he gets to have it both ways. Male intellectuals love these sorts of movies, with good reason: they boast solid stories, inventive filmmaking and good performances, yet they also serve up an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord of spectacularly nasty violence while keeping the presence of women to a minimum.

Kitano's latest gangster film, Brother, is an attempt to expand his reach and his range. It's an inversion of the fish-out-of-water story. Kitano's character, Yamamoto, is a yakuza enforcer fleeing a gang war in Tokyo; he assumes a new identity and travels to Los Angeles to find his brother, Ken (Claude Maki), a low-level drug dealer who hangs with black and Hispanic hoods. But instead of becoming Americanized by his journey, Yamamoto becomes more Japanese, building a small band of black and Latino criminals who flower under his solemn tutelage, embracing the yakuza traditions of stoicism, honor and ritualized fury. Kitano pays homage to a number of arty exploitation movies, including Ridley Scott's Black Rain, in which Michael Douglas' swaggering Yankee cop went to Japan and showed 'em how we do it over here; and Abel Ferrara's fantastically stylized 1990 gangster movie King of New York, in which the pale, slender Christopher Walken led a cadre of vicious, extremely well-dressed nonwhite gangsters.

Right after Yamamoto gets off the plane in Los Angeles, we see a closeup of him standing outside the airport terminal, staring into the camera, eyes hidden behind sunglasses; there's a cut, and we see a tilted angle on the airport, suggesting (rather too blatantly) that the hero is disoriented by his new surroundings. Then, startlingly, the camera rights itself and the world becomes level, stable, orderly: clearly, Yamamoto is a criminal who's instantly at home everywhere, because he knows who he is.

Walking down an L.A. street, Yamamoto bumps into a young black man (Omar Epps), accidentally causing him to drop his beer bottle on the sidewalk. Yamamoto doesn't understand English, but when the young man gets in his face, taunting him and demanding an apology, he knows his resolve is being tested and responds by picking up the broken bottle and jabbing it into the guy's right eye. It later turns out that this wounded person is Denny, a homeboy of his kid brother; as in a classic western, Denny and Yamamoto develop an unlikely friendship with master-apprentice overtones. By the end of the story, Denny has become more Japanese than he ever could have imagined?specifically, more like Yamamoto. It's a cultural fantasy, sure?the cool, middle-aged Japanese man, coming to Los Angeles and instantly wrapping a group of black and brown twentysomethings around his pinkie finger?but because of the chemistry between Kitano, Epps and the other actors, it works.

The ethnically diverse cast of gangsters lends Brother a strange one-world feel, and enables one to read the title on a number of different levels. Denny and his fellow American criminals are "brothers"in the street sense; Yamamoto becomes their big brother; he tries to protect and teach his younger brother, Ken; the word "brother" is a ranking within the yakuza. And the fact that every male character in the picture is violent suggests that violence makes all men brothers.

Metaphoric playfulness aside, Brother is still, when you get right down to it, a fairly typical ultraviolent gangster picture, full of double-crosses, loud confrontations, sudden gunfights, agonizing torture sequences and tons of macho-mysterious dialogue, a la The Godfather. There's so much testosterone that it's a wonder the screen doesn't grow stubble.

Yamamoto is the Capt. Kirk of gangster bosses; he has a problem delegating. If somebody needs to be punched, stabbed or shot, he calls first dibs, and he's got Don Corleone's gift for near-clairvoyant tactical intuition. He's almost never surprised by anything that happens, and sometimes there's no reason why he should know the things he does. In the movie's Tokyo sequence, Yamamoto rescues his yakuza boss from assassination, then loses him hours later in a second hit; after the old man and his bodyguard are gunned down on the other side of town, there's a cut to Yamamoto looking as if he sensed what happened. (Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi.)

Like all of Kitano's gangster movies, Brother would seem incredibly indulgent and self-flattering if its style wasn't so spare and mysterious. The clean, strongly anchored compositions suggest Yasujiro Ozu, and the intricate editing?arguably the most graceful of any Kitano film?darts back and forth through time like in The Limey. Filmed by a mixed crew of Japanese and American actors and technicians, it's clearly a Japanese art-house director's daydream of conquering America without giving up one iota of his Japanese-ness; Yamamoto sees the world of Los Angeles (Hollywood!) more clearly than its own denizens do; no human weakness escapes his notice.

Yamamoto, an Eastwood-style badass who can blast five or six enemy gunmen before they can get off a shot, functions as a mythic gangster archetype, but he's also a stand-in for an artist coming to America from someplace else?an artist of violence. This strange little man has a fearsome vision of how the Los Angeles underworld should be run, and anyone dumb enough to oppose him gets maimed or killed. Talk about final cut.