Let's hear it for the boy

>> Kikujiro is a strange childhood journey

by MARK SLUTSKY

Japanese TV personality, novelist, poet and painter Takeshi Kitano wears many hats, filmmaker not the least of them. Kitano's main claim to fame in North America has come as a result of two of his films, Sonatine and Fireworks (Hana-Bi). They're odd movies--quiet and slow, punctuated with loud bursts of violence. Both of them deal in some way with crime and the Yakuza, or Japanese Mob. Which makes his new film, Kikujiro, an oddity, being a good-natured comic tale of a lonely boy's journey to find his mother. Superficially, it's not really Kitano's turf, but in essence it's not that much of a divergence from his other work.

School's out in an unnamed Japanese city and dour young Masao (Yusuke Sekiguchi) is at a loss. His friends are all on vacation, leaving him bored and lonesome. So the kid decides to find his mother, but not before a watchful friend of his grandmother's insists her husband (Kitano, credited as Beat Takeshi), a silly and self-serious tough guy, accompany him.

They're an uneasy match: Kitano bets all of the kid's money away at the races and insults him a lot, calling him, among other things, a "little shit." They embark on a series of low-key, picaresque adventures--getting trapped at a bus stop, mooching at an expensive hotel, playing endless games with a couple of bikers named Baldy and Fatso, as they both experience an odd childhood. So it goes, until the story quietly wraps up.

Before you get the wrong idea, this is definitely not a kids' movie. It's too slow and a little too disturbing at points (a gag involving a child molester, while shockingly hilarious, would certainly be too traumatic for the little ones). It is, however, quite consistently funny. There are a lot of great sight gags, amplified by their very slow, methodical set-ups, and the gameplaying echoes the middle part of Sonatine in its grave goofiness. There's no doubt Kikujiro is a strange movie, but it works somehow. As for the sentimental bits, they're played out so lightly that they don't weigh the film down. :

Kikujiro opens Friday, Sept. 29 at Cinéma du Parc. See repertory listings for showtimes