‘Sonatine’: The Takeshi Kitano movie Quentin Tarantino called a “masterpiece”
It’s no secret that Quentin Tarantino adores foreign movies, specifically Asian cinema, which has borne significant influence over his own work. From his violent crime drama Reservoir Dogs to his martial arts thriller Kill Bill, the influence of Asian cinema is strikingly apparent.
Tarantino has a specific devotion to Japanese cinema, referring to classic samurai flicks by Akira Kurosawa and action thrillers like Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale as some of his favourites. Although Tarantino often gets accused of downright copying elements of his favourite Japanese masterpieces, it’s clear that he possesses such a deep love for cinema that he often pays direct homage to the films that inspire his own vision.
Famously, the filmmaker spent his youth working as a video clerk, which exposed him to cinema from all around the world. As a self-professed movie buff, his knowledge runs deep, and it’s for that reason Tarantino used his short-lived distribution company, Rolling Thunder Pictures, to release one of his favourite Japanese movies, Sonatine, to US audiences in the late 1990s. Set up under Miramax Films, Tarantino was dedicated to releasing independent, cult or foreign films to theatres, including Chungking Express, Switchblade Sisters and Detroit 9000.
However, when Rolling Thunder Pictures released Sonatine, American audiences were able to view the film, which Tarantino considers a “masterpiece”, with the correct subtitles for the first time. Directed by Takeshi Kitano, also a popular actor in Japan, Sonatine falls into the yakuza genre and follows his character Aniki Murakawa and his gang as they are sent to Okinawa to end a gang war. Soon enough, the men find themselves on the beach laying low. With too much free time on their hands, the film takes an absurdist approach as the men indulge in often comedic yet violent behaviour.
According to Tarantino, “it’s a slightly different take on the standard yakuza film”. The director explained how in the 1990s, samurai and yakuza films did not do too well financially because the dominant movie-going audience was female. Thus, when Kitano released the relentlessly violent Sonatine, it didn’t do very well at the box office. Tarantino continued: “This was a bracing bucket of cold water in the face of the Japanese film industry and yakuza films, and critics loved it”. Since then, Sonatine has been recognised as one of the most important Japanese films of the decade, and thanks to Tarantino’s American distribution, it has been viewed and appreciated by an even wider audience.
The director refers to the Russian Roulette sequence as “one of the most funny and surprisingly shocking I’ve ever seen,” describing it as a “true masterpiece scene”. Whether you’re a fan of Tarantino or not, he certainly knows how to sell a film.
Check out the full video of Tarantino discussing Sonatine below.
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