It must suck being a yakuza. Oh sure, you get to wear the cool shades, you get that badass tattoo on your back, and if anybody messes with you, all arguments tend to be settled quickly. On the other hand, being a yakuza, like everything else, is a job ... and like all jobs, you have to deal with squabbles among your coworkers, competition from other organizations, and that nagging suspicion that you can't really trust your boss.

That's part of what's eating away at Tachibana (Ryo Ishibashi) in Rokuro Mochizuki's film Shin Kanashiki Hittoman (Another Lonely Hitman for all you roundeyes out there). There is a deep regret in him, a knowledge that he has made some poor choices in life and he's paying for them now. A former junkie, he's managed to kick the habit after serving a prison sentence for a yakuza hit in which he not only shoots and kills a man in a restaurant, but also shoots and cripples the man's daughter in a bit of collateral damage that haunts him upon his release.

Those going into Another Lonely Hitman expecting the kind of gore and high octane action you get in, say, some of Takashi Miike's yakuza epics should be warned ... the opening hit is about as gory as the film is going to get (but the opening is pretty gory, particularly when a man's brains run out of his open skull and onto a restaurant table). This is a more stately, meditative film that asks a lot of questions along the way, more like one of Kenji Mizoguchi's pictures.

Ryo Ishibashi has a way of nailing inner sadness with just a subtle look, a skill that fans of Miike's Audition or Sion Sono's Suicide Club may have already recognized. Filmed a few years before either of those movies, this may be the performance where he first learned some of those tricks. His Tachibana spends most of the first two acts of the film in a depressive mode, occasionally punctuated by bits of violent anger, aimed as much at himself as it is at the outside world around him. Remember the old saw that parents used to say before spanking their kids -- "this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you" -- well, Tachibana seems to feel that way during a lot of his violent turns in the movie.

After serving his ten year sentence for the opening murder, Tachibana is offered the services of a prostitute named Yuki (Asami Sawada), and to Yuki's surprise, he actually doesn't want to do anything sexual with her. This establishes a curiousity on her part that leads to her hanging out with Tachibana on a couple of occasions at an amusement park and a seaside monument. She knows (or at least suspects) that Tachibana has some genuine feelings for her when he smacks down her pimp one night after he sees the pimp roughing her up.

In the meantime, however, Tachibana has the need to go back to work, and his old bosses put him on a collection route, shaking down various characters for loan repayments. One of Tachibana's bosses (in a plot touch that reminded me of Fargo) is trying to raise money from these loan repayments (and a little dope peddling on the side) in order to build a golf course on a plot of land near a mountain. Even a yakuza boss, it seems, dreams of something.

It's these sort of character touches that give the film its slow-burning charm. There's another scene taking place in a porno parlor in which Tachibana's fellow yakuza and friend Yuji (not to be confused with Yuki) is talking baseball and movies with the fellow who runs the place that does what the best of Tarantino's pop-culture laden writing does -- it gives these guys the feel of living, breathing people from the real world as opposed to stock genre characters.

Tachibana wants to redeem himself for the mistakes of his past, and the way he starts on this is to get Yuki off her heroin habit. His detox method might leave a little to be desired (it involves a lot of knocking the poor gal around and handcuffing and chaining her to a bed), but it's well intentioned. (Tough love?)

His next step is to start beating the hell out of junkies and drug dealers. Unfortunately, this lands him in dutch with his bosses, and one thing you don't want to do when you're working for a yakuza family is piss off the boss. After being ordered to make amends in the usual yakuza fashion (if you've seen a few of these pictures in your time you know what that is), he decides that enough is enough.

When I initially read the plot summary for the movie (particularly the bit about trying to reform the prostitute), I thought the film might be a kind of Japanese riff on Taxi Driver, and there is a faint echo of Scorsese's urban nightmare in some of the shots of nighttime streets and a slow, haunting saxophone riff that scores most of the picture, but the common elements pretty much end there. The American movie this most reminded me of is Michael Mann's Heat in the way it portrays the workaday existence of underworld characters and the casual pace of its story.

This is a movie to watch when you're in the mood for heavy, thoughtful meal of a picture. It's not really an action piece (though the action there is in the film is handled very efficiently), it's a character piece, and a good one at that. You know you're watching a good gangster movie when you're hoping its main character will somehow manage to live through the ending.

(A brief final note: this 1995 picture is being released later in the year on DVD by Artsmagic. The disc I watched was simply a screening copy and does not reflect the final DVD product. When the final dvd is released, I'm confident Naoaki Imazumi's cinematography will come off exceptionally well in the transfer, and I hope they get Tom Mes to do one of his excellent commentaries.)