Skip to main content

The Perfection of GIRI HAJI



The final episode of this extraordinary series included one of the single most audacious and hermetic  pieces of choreography that one could ever hope to see in a tale of violent redemption among the yakuza. 

Or indeed in most other contexts.

At the climactic point at which multiple plot strands have plaited together, including through a butterfly effect from the other side of the world, in perfect union on a London rooftop with a motley array of hardened types facing off and a teenager poised - literally - between life and death one might legitimately expect either another blood soaked confrontation or a deus ex machina intervention. 

Instead what takes place would not have been out of place in high opera or ballet. 

The scene fades slightly to monochrome, the movement becomes formalised, more characters appear and everyone becomes quite literally a choreographed version of themselves. They  move together and apart, they cling for a moment, they face each other. Their movement is both of their own volition and that of the others. The threads between them are visible through the dance.

It has become relatively commonplace to talk about balletic violence usually meaning little more than  that the speed of the frames has been slowed down or that shards and fragments of glass provide a kaleidoscopic background as one more person is added to the body count.

What happens in Giri Haji is of quite a different order. 

Not only is there no violence this is a kinetic resolution of moral dilemmas. The movement comes from the inside of each character but its expression is the means of reaching a conclusion, on deciding what must happen, on what matters most. 

Reflecting interiority with such intensity has the same emotional heightening as an aria or a pas de deux. It teeters on the brink of absurdity but clings on because what is being represented is genuine and recognisable to all even if we rarely bring such a profound level of feeling to the surface.

The series and this sequence in particular has received high praise, and near adulation in some quarters, and it feels entirely merited. A mixed media world in which the artefacts of two quite different cultures are brought to bear and universal moral dilemmas are played out at the interface between them.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Best (and Worst) Films of 2023

  One of the most joyful rediscoveries this year was Percy Adlon's  Bagdad Cafe  which in a wonderfully surreal manner captures the magic, literal and figurative, that a most unlikely outsider brings to the moribund, allowing them to realise what they have been missing through their obsessive introspection and to grow through the recognition of the value in difference. Could there possibly be a message in there? In the 'they do still make'em like that' category the outstanding example was the  The Three Musketeers: D'Artagnan  which was pure pleasure from the tip of its épée to the handle of its poignard, running full tilt with the ridiculousness of the plot half way round France and back across the Channel without pausing for breath. Hats are worn with an angle of jaunt worthy of an Expressionist noir, swords are barely ever in a scabbard, panelling is chewed liberally and Eva Green's use of her belle poitrine auditions it for separate billing in the cast list.
Post a Comment
Read more

There are worse things than cows on the line

A new explanation for the delay to my train this afternoon: cows on the line. This did, however, provide some time to reflect on other rather more serious characteristics of modern life than the inconvenience occasioned by the peregrinations of the odd Friesan.  So here are six which seem to me to be particularly pernicious aspects of our current situation.  1.  Libertarianism : otherwise known as letting me do whatever I want and a plague on everyone else. Such a convenient doctrine for the already powerful and utterly malign as a philosophy for the common good with a resolution to remove everything that might be a constraint or require a contribution to the commonweal. This is wholly distinct from liberalism and indeed individualism which are both important and positive. The basic issues that libertarianism always avoid are that a free for all never serves those without agency. The deep structural imbalances in society that fuel inequality have to be collectively addressed
4 comments
Read more

Museum Hours

A new blog which fittingly has a first post about the  film  which provided the inspiration; a quite wonderful, wry look at a few days in the life of a museum attendant in Vienna. There have presumably been easier pitches in the history of cinema but we should be deeply grateful that this gently subversive piece made it through. For this is a film that shouts quietly. About the way that we all too easily jump to conclusions about people based on what they look like and what they do; indeed how in a gallery we ignore or look down on the watchers without reflecting that they may be rather more acute in their observation of us. Our attendant relatively early lets slip that he spent much of his former life on the road with rock groups and in one particularly droll moment slightly hesitantly announces to an amused Mary Margaret O'Hara that he does still like heavy metal whilst looking as though he would be considerably more likely to put on a CD of Mantovani. About the way that w
3 comments
Read more