G/H exploits the oldest gangster plot in the world: there are two brothers, one a sober, conservative family man employed as a cop and a younger sibling who is wild, reckless, and a gangster. The younger brother is thought to be dead when the show begins -- the victim of a Yakuza gangland slaying. In fact, the gangster (Yuto) has been dispatched to London to kill the son of a prominent Tokyo mobster who leads a rival gang. This murder accomplished, the gangsters in Tokyo go to war, slaughtering one another in impressively violent raids and skirmishes. The embattled cops in Tokyo dispatch Kenzo, the sober older brother to London to hunt down the killer and, therefore, bring the violence to an end in Japan. (Kenzo thinks Yuto is dead and doesn't know that he will be, in fact, hunting his own brother.) In London, Kenzo forms a relationship with a female forensics instructor Rachel Weitzmann, who has been blackballed by her fellow cops for ratting on a corrupt member of the police force. (This guy just happened to be her boyfriend and the woman's motives for turning in her paramour was that he was about to leave her for another woman.) Back in Tokyo, Kenzo's daughter Rei, who is a rebellious feminist, runs away from home and flies to London to be with her dad. (She seems to be about 17.) Rei adores her uncle, Yuto. In London, Yuto has been doing some bodyguard work for Abbot, a crooked bar owner and would-be Yakuza. Abbot is tangled-up in a mob war in London involving hordes of Albanian gunmen fighting crowds of Japanese London-Yakuza. (I can't recall what causes this conflict but it involves lots of assassinations and culminates in a huge gun-battle in the fourth episode). Kenzo gets recruited by a flamboyant homosexual kid, Rodney, who is half-Japanese -- Rodney needs someone to protect him from his vicious pimp. Rodney is mourning the death of his transvestite lover, Tiff who has committed suicide but he's too hip and proud to show that his heart is breaking and so he conceals his grief behind a mask of Oscar Wilde-style aphorisms and general bitchiness. (while ingesting heroic amounts of drugs.) While Kenzo is slowly learning that he is chasing his own brother through the London underworld, his elderly father dies in Tokyo and his marriage seems to fall apart. No worry -- he is now in love with the Scottish forensics expert, Rachel, who has become his helper in his investigation in London (Rachel is Jewish and invites motley crew of Rodney, Rei, and Kenzo to her house for a Yom Kippur dinner.). Meanwhile, Rei comes out as a lesbian and has a love affair with a British girl -- Kenzo seems strangely unconcerned about Rei associating with the demi-monde in Soho where the action takes place, but I guess he's got other matters on his mind. It turns out that Yuto was banished from Tokyo because he impregnated the beautiful daughter of his Yakuza boss. She's had the baby and is held in confinement by her angry dad. When Kenzo's mother, the grandmother of the baby, learns about this, she and Kenzo's estranged wife manage to free the mother and infant and, then, go on the lam in Japan's hinterland with deadly mobsters chasing them. And so on and on, until the bloody end of the epic.
From this summary, which omits a dozen characters and a half-dozen subplots, the reader will see that the whole thing is a melange of cliches and well-worn plot devices. Kenzo is the archetypal "fish out of water" in London; a rather slovenly detective from the London force has been sent to Tokyo as an exchange for Kenzo and so the "fish out of water" plot is comically doubled -- it's serious in London and funny in Tokyo. (Although the minor character of the London cop in Tokyo has a major role in the denouement.) The odd-couple buddy movie theme is developed in Kenzo's alliance with Rodney, the cynical rent-boy who undercuts Kenzo's sobriety with various quips and snarky remarks. There's a love affair with Rachel, the Scottish forensics instructor that is pretty standard fare for this sort of crime picture. This culminates in a funny / tragic scene in which Kenzo says: "I was a good Japanese husband and father, a dutiful police officer and a happily married man a month ago. And, now, I'm in London helping my Yakuza brother escape the cops and engaged in an adulterous affair with an English woman." To which Rachel replies in her best Scottish brogue: "Well, I'm not an English woman," an answer that baffles Kenzo because of his inability to hear the difference between the various dialects spoken. (The Japanese is subtitled. You will need to turn on the subtitles for the British characters as well since they speak in a gangster argot that was indecipherable to me on the soundtrack.) The series is designed to interim-climax at the end of the fourth episode in a very long and bloody gun battle -- this is gangsters killing each other picturesquely in Tokyo intercut with a bloodbath involving an army of Albanian bad guys and Japanese mobsters in Soho.
The program works because we are interested in the characters. Rodney is fascinating, a little pathetic,and obviously highly intelligent -- in the last half of the show he's doing lots of drugs; there's a priceless scene in which he annihilates a drug-abuse Group Therapy session with his eloquent sarcasm. Kenzo is dour,but dutiful and obviously horrified by the plight in which he finds himself. Rachel wants sex and is constantly finding herself with unsuitable partners -- she's also sad and a little bit pathetic, although she's resilient. Yuto obviously yearns to become a solid citizen like his older brother but covers this inclination with a veneer of toughness. Abbot, the sleazy bar owner, is extremely funny and his efforts to act like a Yakuza are amusing. Rei is vulnerable and confused, easily exploited by her new girlfriend. Even the minor characters are interesting -- the two side-kick cops (the fat British guy matched with a fat Japanese cop) are engaging and humorous. One of the most startling things in the show is Kenzo's mother, who seems to be a typically repressed and silent Japanese housewife -- she turns feral in the film's last couple episodes in which she defends her grandchild; it's evident that the old lady is capable of all sorts of mayhem. Furthermore, the program's astonishing final scenes involve a Tarantino - John Woo type standoff on the roof of a Soho building, a sequence that is unlike anything that I've ever seen a crime drama of this sort. Rei diverts the combatants from killing one another by threatening to dive off the building's parapet. As everyone lunges after her, the film goes to sepia-toned monochrome slow-motion and, then, everyone participates in a modern dance interlude that is probably about five minutes long and that recapitulates in eloquent gestures the major relationships in the film. (For instance,we see Kenzo's dead father suddenly appear. He seems to dance toward Kenzo who opens his arms to embrace him but, then, we see that the old man is lunging toward Yuto, his other son, whom he has always preferred to Kenzo -- we have seen this in a harrowing call that Kenzo makes to his dying father in which the old man is confused and thinks he is talking to the absent, presumed dead Yuto.) I thought that this ballet sequence was profound and extremely moving -- many people may just think it pretentious. But the ingenuity and audacity of the dance scene is admirable.
I watched G/H in two-program increments per night.. This is a commitment of 8 hours (episodes are about 52 minutes long.). Despite its innumerable cliches and improbabilities (there are a lot of unlikely coincidences in the film) I looked forward to each episode and so how can I not recommend the show to you?
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