Blood & Bones

The Korean born Japanese director Yoichi Sai brings the tale of family violence to the screen, which is based on the adaptation of Yan Sogil's same title novel.

With Takeshi Kitano playing the leading patriarch Kim Joong Pyong, the story begins in Osaka, Japan in 1923. Kim, a native Korean who left Cheju Island from Korea, reaches Osaka, hoping to find a better life.

When harsh reality makes his dream a far cry from where he stands, he resorts to violence and stubbornness to achieve his goal. He rapes Yong Hee (Masai Suzuki), another Korean immigrant, and they get married, and have a son named Masao, and a daughter named Hanako. He opens a fishcake factory and abuses his workers in long hour work, together with his barbaric behavior, which is an idea he strongly believes in. As time goes by, he earns a fortune, which makes him creating the second path of wealth: loan shark. At an extremely high interest and hard pressures on anyone who borrows from him, he was left with nothing but money and mistresses.

Years passes and his family is still under his pressure, which eventually leads to the fall of the family.

Bllood and Bones is a tale of family violence from a ruthless man who attempts to dominate what is around him. Raw and direct to your face, this is certainly not a family friendly tale on how a man repents from the sins he committed to his family.

Being a Korean immigrant in Japan, Yoichi Sai knows best on the facts of the Korean community living in Japan in the previous century, and how the first generation Korean immigrant blends their culture in the Japan society during the post Depression era and World War 2. While the film is portraying the glorious side of how the Koreans seek better life in Japan, it is not a smooth path they are taking. They are still faced with the discrimination of the Japanese as a second rate citizen, even though Japan wants Korea to join forces during World War 2.

Back home, Joon Pyong terrorizes the family thru endless violence, both physical and emotional. Workers were abused, creditors were driven to death, lust for beautiful women and endless physical relationship and abuse on the mistresses were just part of Joon Pyong's lifestyle. Yoichi Sai is not reaping the seed of fear in the audience, creating a negative impression. More rather, these are the bare naked facts that happens around us, even till today. The harsh environment in a developing country makes Joon Pyong's behavior, unfortunately, a norm to him.

As the title says, Blood and Bones. No blood were seen, no bones were broken. Instead, it's the emotion that bleeds and breaks into pieces, which can be explained by the downfall of the Kim family. And Takeshi Kitano's performances makes everyone bleed and left broken.

Blood and Bones is not a feel good movie of any kind. It makes you want to stop more people from bleeding, and breaking into pieces.

Blood and Bone might as well be called 'Once Upon A Time In Japan' for the strong resemblance it bears to Sergio Leone's epic account of the immigrant experience in post-war America. The immigrants in Yoichi Sai's unrelentingly violent film are Korean, displaced there after the Japanese occupation, the country and any national identity further destabilised after Japan's defeat in the war. Arriving in Osaka in 1923, Kim Shunpei is determined to make a better life for himself, and when he returns from the war sets up a fish-cake factory, expanding later into the loan shark business. His explosively violent temperament however means that he leaves behind him a trail of death and destruction that doesn't even spare his family.

Well-known for violence in his own gangster movies, 'Beat' Takeshi Kitano takes brutality to monstrous proportions in a performance of remarkable and terrifying intensity, but you could tire very quickly of him punching women in a yet another appalling rampage. In some ways however Kitano is just too big a personality, even for such an epic film, overshadowing any finer points it might have made about the Korean-Japanese experience.

This great movie is not just a study of domestic violence. It's much more than that. It's a historical document of the life in Japan roughly from WWII to the 1970'. It shows the life of Korean immigrants in Japan, the constant latent hostility between the Japanese and the Koreans, the difficulty to have a reasonable life in Japan during that time, the way of life in Japan for the "simple folk", the strong hierarchy in the family and in business, and many more aspects. This movie is not entertaining as such and is certainly not fun to watch, it's brutal and often makes you sick. But you can learn more about domestic violence and about the Japanese way of life than in any other way. The script and the actors are great and everything is not just authentic but REAL. So you should not watch this movie for fun but because the subjects are so very important and because you will learn so much – even if you know Japan quite well already.

Yoichi Sai's long film is about a Korean immigrant (to Japan), played by Takeshi Kitano, who cares about nothing but his own pleasure and gain. His destructive personality and violent temper decimate everything and everyone around him. Based on a true story, the script does not attempt to explain or justify Kitano's character. It presents him without judgment.

The rapes and beatings (mostly of family members) are relentless and occasionally surreal. One brutal exchange between father and son takes place during a rainstorm and is visually arresting. Another sequence, where father and son respectively destroy each other's homes, has a dark, humorous edge.

The director chooses his shots carefully and recreates the periods in which the film is set (circa 1923 to the mid-80's) effectively but never ostentatiously.

Although there is much repetition, the film does serve up a smörgåsbord of atrocities for exploitation fans. The treatment of women is harsh. One beating, in particular, of a young woman by her coarse husband, is strong stuff indeed and flawlessly conveys the cycle of violence a perpetrator creates within his own circle and extended family.

Clearly given a generous budget and clearly a labor of love, BLOOD AND BONES is well worth seeing and should not be forgotten.

Kitano is extraordinary.

This movie represents the first leading role Beat Takeshi has taken in more than a decade in a movie he didn't direct. The advance reviews of his performance were enthusiastic, and his powerful depiction of the violent and controlling Kim Shunpei more than lives up to the notices. Still, the film itself is a flawed creation; unable to pack all of the critical backstory of the original best-selling book even into a 140-minute film, the director settles for presenting a series of scenes that cycle repeatedly between set-up, violent outburst, and aftermath , with little connecting tissue and almost no effort to explain how or why the main character became the dangerous 'monster' he is. With leaps of years and even decades between scenes, it's clear that many of the book's defining incidents failed to make the screenplay, and while the lead and supporting performances are almost uniformly fine, I left the theater exhausted from the violence but feeling nothing for the victims--Kim's family, neighbors and employees--of it. (It is also probable that foreign audiences, not familiar with the cultural, political, and social issues surrounding the ethnic Korean community in Japan, will have trouble appreciating the crucial nuances of language and expression, most of which are unlikely to survive the subtitling process).