SONATINE | FOMO Secret Cinema Tbilisi - Asian Film Week

SONATINE

Thursday 15 October, 19:00

Takeshi Kitano | 1993 | Japan | 1h34m | Japanese with English subtitles

SONATINE begins like a yakuza film and then quietly starts dismantling one. Murakawa, an ageing Tokyo gangster, is sent to Okinawa to help settle a dispute between rival gangs. The assignment feels wrong almost immediately. After violence erupts, Murakawa and his men retreat to an isolated beach house and wait.

That is where the film becomes something else. Instead of filling the time with plotting and revenge, Kitano watches these men play. They stage mock fights, build traps, fool around on the sand and behave with the aimlessness of children on holiday. Those scenes change the way the later violence lands. The men stop feeling like genre types and start feeling like people briefly released from the roles they have spent their lives performing.

Kitano directs, writes, edits and stars as Murakawa. His performance is almost completely stripped back, with very little dialogue or obvious emotional signalling. At the time, Kitano was still best known in Japan as Beat Takeshi, one of the country’s biggest comedians and television personalities. His career has a strange parallel with Jerry Lewis in the West: a comic entertainer whose work behind the camera gradually forced critics to reconsider him as a serious filmmaker.

The film screened in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 1993 and initially struggled commercially in Japan, but its reputation grew overseas. Quentin Tarantino later released it in the United States through Rolling Thunder Pictures, helping cement its cult status.

What makes SONATINE endure is the way it empties the gangster film of bravado. Beneath the guns and gang politics is a film about boredom, mortality and men who seem to understand that the violence waiting for them cannot really be escaped.

ABOUT ASIAN FILM WEEK

Asian Film Week is exactly the kind of programming FOMO exists for: major classics, cult discoveries and films you rarely get the chance to see on a cinema screen in Tbilisi. This week has been curated with Denis from Ukraine, a FOMO Film Club lifetime member with a real passion for Asian cinema, whose recommendations helped fill some gaps in my own knowledge and pushed the programme in directions I might not have reached alone.

A lot of care has gone into making the week feel broad, balanced and genuinely worth exploring. You’ll find landmark films from directors already well known in the West alongside stranger, more underground work that deserves a much wider audience. If Asian cinema is already your thing, I hope there are still a few surprises here. If it isn’t, I hope this week gives you a great place to start..