by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

The quick classification of Japanese director Sabu's Drive would be the caper comedy slot. But that's selling it short. It's an insightful study of the human character, structured like an intricate Rube Goldberg device, disguised as a heist-gone-wrong gangster flick, bookended by sweet romance and lugging a ghost story on its back.

A neurotic, compulsively rule-abiding salaryman named Kenichi (Shinichi Tsutsumi) is carjacked by a trio of bank robbers making their getaway, while their gang leader absconds with the loot. Thus begins a chaotic parade of events. One gangster, with a strong spiritual bent, literally stumbles into his new calling as a punk rock singer. A spilled glass of wine leads to a snitch with a fatal pen-in-neck wound across the room. Car keys dropped down a gopher hole result in a stuck crook berated by a phantom samurai.

There's a recurrent theme in the films of Sabu, born Hiroyuki Tanaka. From his first film, the brilliant and energetic Dangan Runner, through Postman Blues, Unlucky Monkey, Monday and now Drive, he collides ordinary working stiffs and surly yakuza thugs like a gleeful child bashing toy cars together. Then he tosses in minor slip-ups and coincidences that catalyze massive, life-changing absurdities. The result is the lives of all parties involved being turned upside down and inside out to excellent comedic effect, and in that respect Sabu's got the timing of a master jazz drummer.

The rigid formality of Japanese society, and particularly the excessive stoicism of its gangster culture (at least, as traditionally presented on screen), is the raw material that Sabu fashions into droll, deadpan comedy with both brains and heart. He explodes the stiff machismo to lay bare the befuddled, fallible human beings underneath, and likewise dispenses with, or even inverts, the clichés of the Japanese gangster genre. I won't give away the ending but it certainly does not involve all parties expiring with great drama and noblesse in puddles of their own blood. In fact, given his wit and evident faith in our goofy species, Sabu stands in stark and notable contrast to the cynicism, cruelty and slick shock value that marks the edgier elements of Japanese pop cinema.

At Fantasia on Friday, July 25, 7:30pm, and
Saturday, July 26, 9:45pm

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