Broken Rage

Takeshi Kitano

Takeshi "Beat" Kitano's Broken Rage has languished all 2025 on Amazon Prime with little notice. It is an odd film, divided in two discrete parts, the former a crime drama, the latter a comedic parody of a crime drama, à la Jerry Lewis. Kitano plays Mouse, a hit man who lives anonymously and follows an almost ritualistic existence. We follow him as he executes two jobs, but he is then apprehended by the cops who put the screws to him. Mouse agrees to infiltrate a yakuza mob who control the heroin market. Mouse helps brings down that gang and struts off, presumably to enter the witness protection program. The tone is tossed off and minimal, like the protagonist. The comic second half of this very short film, 67 minutes, has the same narrative, actors, and situations as the first half; with the addition of pratfalls and very broad humor. 

Broken Rage is certainly a self indulgent film, but it is an accurate reflection of the bifurcation of Kitano's career. He is best known in the US for directing and starring in hard boiled action films like Sonatine and Fireworks. Kitano had a brief vogue here in the 1990s, but has fallen off the map critically in America during this century. In Japan, he is best known as a comic performer and that has been his bread and butter in his homeland. Thus, Broken Rage displays the poles of his talent: half Jean Gabin, half Leslie Nielsen. Broken Rage barely qualifies as a feature, but it has structural integrity and strong performances. It further establishes Kitano as a minor director, but a major performer.

He Who Must Die

Pierre Vaneck

I've been itching to see Jules Dassin's He Who Must Die (Celui qui doit mourir) since I read Peter Wolf's memoir, Waiting on the Moon. In it, Wolf recounts his being taken to the film by his parents whereupon he eventually falls asleep on the shoulder of the woman next to him. That lady was named Marilyn Monroe who was there on a date night with her husband Arthur Miller, just two everyday New York intellectuals paying homage to one of Joseph McCarthy's victims as Wolf's parents were. The movie is a French language wide screen version of Nikos Kazantzakis' 1948 novel Christ Recrucified. Both works are set in a Greek village under Ottoman rule in the year of 1921. Refugees from a town sacked by the Turks arrive, are spurned by the town's ruling class, the Church and bourgeoisie, and flee to the hills. The village people are rehearsing their version of the Passion Play which they put on every seven years. However, events spin out of control and Christ's sacrifice recurs after a class war erupts. The battle rages on as the film ends. 

In his review in The New Leader, Manny Farber detected the "tang of propaganda" in the film's images and I concur.⛨ However, I don't think this was necessarily a problem since Kazantzakis was fellow traveler if not a doctrinaire Communist. I am not so sure about Jesus. The film reminded Farber of Steinbeck. Nevertheless, Dassin's allegorical groupings of the lumpen rural proletariat results in stasis rather than movement, posturing rather than acting. This is social realism at its most ham-fisted, turning an ambivalent and questioning book into a Marxist fresco. There are endless shots of the choreographed peasantry happily warbling or intoning their dignity. I, unlike Peter Wolf, did not fall asleep, though. Enough of Kazantzakis' dialogue remains and I especially enjoyed the readings by Jean Servais and Fernand Ledoux as the film's good and bad pharisees. However, the film's performances are all over the map. Melina Mercouri has a bad case of the cutes as the picture's Magdalene figure and Pierre Vaneck is hopeless as the film's creeping Jesus. The film's Pilate figure is the most broadly drawn, a Turkish Snidely Whiplash avec catamite. A pretentious curiosity, all in all. 

⛨ Manny Farber, The New Leader, Three Art-y Films, pg. 26.

Who by Fire

Noah Parker

Philippe Lesage's Who by Fire (Comme le feu) is a Canadian drama than conveys the claustrophobia of intimacy from first shot to last. It is a long film, over two and a half hours long, and a slow burn that unspools at its own pace. It is set at a remote lakeside lodge in Northern Quebec owned by Blake (Arieh Worthalter), a maverick filmmaker. The film chronicles a troubled reunion he hosts with his former collaborator, Albert (Paul Ahmarani). Albert brings along his two late adolescent children and, crucially, a friend of one of them named Jeff (Noah Parker). Jeff is the main witness to the various entanglements that ensue, the only character given point of view shots by the director. 

Jeff's awkwardness and essential estrangement mark this film as a coming of age drama and, indeed, we do detect some growth in his compassion by film's end. The film has its outdoor sequences which contain more than a whiff of danger, hiking, hunting and canoeing through rapids, but the real battles occur indoors over many bottles of wine as the temporary housemates share meals around a table captured by the largely fixed gaze of Lesage's camera. Despite the many stunned onlookers, which includes Blake's staff and the odd film star (Irène Jacobs), Albert and Blake partake in verbal sparring, taking the opportunity to trade recriminations and old resentments. The backbiting gets so vicious that the film becomes a nightmarish dreamscape of bourgeois neurosis. The frantic party mood, highlighted by a conga line to "Rock Lobster", quickly devolves into bleary disenchantment. The constant petty humiliations and lengthy harangues that dot Who by Fire recall Dostoyevsky who Lesage's script alludes to. So too does the final scene which highlights compassion to a beast allegedly dumber than a man. 

The film does reach discordant heights, but it is far from perfect. The scenes of canoes maneuvering through white water are unconvincing. Some of the motivations for actions by the characters are sketchily motivated. Still, there is a sense of unease in Who by Fire that I found unsettling and memorable. The cast is outstanding, delivering the high falutin dialogue mellifluously.