p_reavy

Hana-Bi convinced me that Takeshi Kitano was an excellent actor, but I was less sure of him as a director. Sonatine convinced me that he's a talented director, too.

Whether acting or behind the camera, understatement seems to be Kitano's strongest asset. It is put to much use in this understated film.

There are some scenes which are visually memorable, such as the firework fight on the beach or the final bloodbath, which is dealt with so obliquely that it's shot from outside the building it takes place in.

Still more impressive are the emotional spaces that the film maps out. Unacted-on feelings and unfelt actions.

Since Sonatine is about a man who find change impossible, I wonder from my Western viewpoint whether it looked ahead in any way to the social change in Japan which has recently been reported.

In any case, after watching Sonatine, I see where Takeshi Kitano's reputation came from.

This is a bleak, occasionally funny film, a little flawed by its obsessive mentality but worth seeing.

We follow an IT trainer barely holding down his job, struggling against loneliness, endlessly diagnosing the pointlessness of it all. Perhaps not entirely new territory for a French film - similar ground was covered not long ago by Cédric Kahn's L'Ennui. But there's enough observational wit here to hold our interest throughout, and the slightly unconvincing mid-section is compensated for by closing scenes that hit the right note.

The character's dislike of women is the film's most disturbing element. His hypotheses, while sometimes wild enough to entertain, are unlikely to be totally shared by the viewer. The shots of trains travelling to industrial parks made me think of Martin Parr's Boring Postcards and if you find something profound about multi-storey car parks, this is the film for you. There are also incidental treats such as the intriguingly dull food that "Our Hero" eats and his disgustingly nicotine-stained fingers.

A broad range of people linked to the current and past techno scene have made it into the film and it would be mean not to note how great Holger Czukay's dancing is. But the publicity for Modulations says it "traces the evolution of electronic music", which is not quite true. There's quite a leap from the jumble of clips involving Pierre Henry and John Cage into the familiar material on disco, Kraftwerk and Derrick May.

A more serious documentary might have challenged what the techno movement has to say about itself. Techno's rhetoric is borrowed from the modernists of the 50s and 60s, but maybe the real story is a more familiar one for pop music: the dancefloor's appetite for the next big thing.