Dir. Kensaku Watanabe, 2004, Japan , 111 min (Subtitles)
Cast:
Hirofumi Arai, Ittoku Kishibe, Aoi Miyazaki, Masatoshi Nagase
There's more to the work of a hitman than meets the eye, as frail but deadly veteran Maruyama (Ittoku Kishibe of Zatoichi fame) has learnt over many years of professional practise. The emotions of the gunman are so closely linked to the act of killing that they colour his bullets (literally) as they leave the gun. A bullet will be black if fired in revenge, blue if in sadness, yellow if in fear. There is one colour Maruyama hasn't quite figured out yet, though, and, in 33-year-old writer/director Kensaku Watanabe's The Loved Gun, the question of what emotion produces red bullets is tied to a contemplative exploration of the moral universe of a gunman and, as we shall discover, to Maruyama's ultimate fate.
Like much art (and cinema in particular) dealing with the murkier side of human nature, Rabudo Gan (The Loved Gun) struggles to reconcile the characters' sociopathic behaviour with their more appealing, even lovable, side. While by no means a naturalistic film, Watanabe's second feature after The Story of PuPu (1998) does go some way to explore the question: Can compassion and a sense of honour redeem a professional assassin? Maruyama and the other central characters seem to answer with a resounding yes.
The prompt for Maruyama's long quest in Rabudo Gan is a contract to track and finish off another gunman, Hayamada (Nagase), who, to complicate things, calls Maruyama 'dad' because, as we soon learn, he grew up under the veteran hitman's tutelage after both his parents were killed. As if he hadn't enough problems already, Maruyama must share the contract with a young upstart, tetchy Taneda (Arai), whose bravado will soon be checked by the demands of the mission and Maruyama's cool superiority.
Violence, loss and homicidal desires are also the starting point of young orphan Miyuki (Miyazaki), who will accidentally clash with Hayamada only to then help him, befriend him and hire him to eliminate his dead father's former lover. As the four characters are coloured in by their moral and personal choices, they are inexorably drawn together for their final confrontation...
While sticking to a conventional narrative line, The Loved Gun plays around with time, space and plausibility as much as most contemporary Japanese cinema of its genre. The hit-men pulling out their guns seems to be the cue for the camera and editing to be given carte blanche, and the characters spotting the colour of a bullet in mid-air is only the start of a collection of cinematic pirouettes to make the most demanding CSI fan proud.
Given the skill shown by Watanabe and his actors in The Loved Gun, and the obvious care that has gone into building the characters, it's slightly odd that it's so hard somehow to empathise with them. Perhaps the idea of a killer redeemed through his good qualities is, after all, too stylised for an audience to accept wholeheartedly. A hitman's moral integrity is unlikely to make much of a difference to anyone at the wrong end of a gun, even a gun as stylish as Hayamada's Akira (another central character in its own right)... And as for the colour of the bullet, well, you might as well decide for yourself.
Miguel Sopena
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