I'm not sure I'd call the situation for the beggar couple, Matsumoto and Sawako, a happy ending in any way, nor is their death beautiful-- the way they're suspended from the branch, with necks snapped after presumably having committed suicide like that, is frankly rather ugly. Furthermore, it's not like things are great for the other two. The pop idol, whose obsessed fan blinded himself and was killed on the road like that-- her career is ruined, her face severely damaged (plastic surgery does get better, but...), she's basically miserable. The Yakuza woman, she did survive I guess, but she's been waiting something like 3 decades, and the guy she thought she loved turns out to have been a murderous crime boss (even if he doesn't convey that immediately).
I thought the film was very, very good but not great-- sort of a 7 out of 10, and it's because I thought, among other things, that Kitano was being a bit too obvious and overt with the way he was displaying things here. Basically, 3 members of each "couple" did extreme things for their love-- Matsumoto runs away from his arranged wife to get Sawako out of the mental hospital after she's presumably OD'd on so many pills that she's suffered severe brain damage, Nukui blinds himself for Haruna, and the woman who loved the Yakuza, kept going to that bench for some 30-odd years. Many of the characters are suicidal-- in the case of Matsumoto and Sawako, both are, although Matsumoto commits suicide (with Sawako off the cliff) *because* Sawaka had attempted it herself before. Nukui is of course suicidal himself.
As I was writing elsewhere, if you look at the characters in a literal way-- they have, uh, issues. The "extreme love" they have here isn't beautiful in any way, and I think Kitano was communicating that, contrasting the excessive love with the beautiful surroundings. The extreme love of the characters here actually does them, and sometimes others, grievous harm-- it's a sort of obsessive love that's beyond anything that's truly beautiful. All 3 stories are compelling, but the one I found to be most moving, was the Yakuza one, since in this case the Yakuza boss's "suicidal tendencies" were more a matter of repentance for his own history of crime and murder, although even here, I wish Kitano had been more subtle about it.
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rooprect
18 years ago
I agree that each person was overly obsessive, but I didn't really interpret any of the characters as being suicidal at all (except for Sawako at the beginning, obviously). I think if you watch it again, you'll see that the cliff was an accident. The camera shows plainly that Matsumoto's foot slipped on the ice, just like earlier in the movie when the two of them are walking by the seaside. To me, it was just another very Kitano-esque twist of fate coming out of the blue (see Scene at the Sea and Kidzu Ritan for other examples of this).
If it were indeed a suicide, then I'd agree with you that it was a very bleak ending. But I'm convinced that their deaths just happened to occur at that moment, which was actually their finest moment throughout the whole film. As I cited in an earlier post, Kitano said in an interview that he does not see death as a bad thing, unlike the western perception. With this view, we see that the circumstances of death are trivial compared to what is in their hearts at the time of death. Only the observer feels the tragedy.
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