In Takeshi Kitano’s fractured and despondent genre piece, the director/star (under his acting name, " Beat " Takeshi) plays Yamamoto, a yakuza who is forced to leave Japan after his boss is killed. He lands in LA and seeks out his younger half-brother, Ken (Claude Maki), whom he finds embroiled in small-time drug dealing with a group of African- and Hispanic-Americans. Yamamoto leads Ken’s gang into a turf war with the reigning Mexican outfit and a merger with the Little Tokyo mob. After that, they become big enough that they must face the Mafia.

As in his previous films (such as 1993’s Sonatine and 1998’s Fireworks), Kitano is mainly interested in what he can say about ambiguity, violence, commitment, and integrity. The story of the gangster who takes over foreign territory cries out to be milked for local color. But Kitano’s Los Angeles, apart from a few deserted streets, consists mostly of interiors (the gangsters even stay inside their loft office to play basketball). The drained, ugly colors make what little we see of LA appear less glamorous than it looked on CNN during the Rodney King riots. Apart from a token running gag about tipping (which he wisely drops after about five minutes), Kitano doesn’t bother much with the idea of Yamamoto’s culture shock. The film isn’t about the contrast between two cultures so much as it’s about how a Japanese gangster comes to LA and dominates it by acting as if he were still in Japan.

The core of Brother is the relationship between Yamamoto and Denny (Omar Epps), a gangsta who gets off to a bad start with the visiting yakuza by hassling him on the street (in return, Denny gets a broken bottle in the eye). Soon, though, they bond over the sort of inane pastimes that always make up at least one-fourth of a Kitano movie — here, cheating at dice and betting on whether more men or women will pass under a window. Eventually, Yamamoto becomes " brother " (in Japanese, aniki, as he is referred to throughout the film) to Denny. Kitano’s treatment of their relationship is notable for what it leaves out: he refuses to develop the hint that Yamamoto and Denny must overcome their racial prejudices to be friends. The key to the film’s view of race is Kitano’s career-constant perception that all his characters are made outsiders — not just by their race but by their profession or gender (Yamamoto’s ebullient mistress is the one woman in an otherwise all-male world).

Kitano’s visual spareness yields lingering, offhand effects: a gangster taking one last shot with the basketball as everyone files out of the loft; a gray, forgotten, end-of-the-world diner that suddenly becomes the center of nowhere when the displaced hero picks it as the site of his doomed last stand. A signature shot has a multi-ethnic group of dark suits standing around a loft waiting to be slaughtered. In the context of an American-made crime movie, Kitano’s minimalism (as an actor, but most important as a director) is welcome. The film flaunts its flatness and stylization of attitude in such scenes as the conference-table meeting between two rival gangs: they stare at, or past, each other as if refusing to accept each other’s existence, and Kitano insists on the spaces that break up their bare-bones dialogue.

The avoidance of pyrotechnics (when it’s obvious the budget could have provided for them) is an insult to Hollywood (and Hong Kong). Kitano keeps a climactic gun battle off screen, holding instead on the flashes of light that flicker over a dead body in a car; this is followed by a thrown-away shot that surveys the aftermath of the carnage. The withholding of visual excitement is a characteristic Kitano maneuver: earlier in the film, the camera holds on Denny entering the loft to find Yamamoto being held up by two thugs, and the reverse shot doesn’t come until the gunplay starts.

The last section of the film is dominated by a fatalism without exhilaration. ( " It’s over. We’ll all die, " Yamamoto says with a dry laugh.) Suicidal rigor is Yamamoto’s main contribution to LA gang culture. The others don’t understand it, but they admire it and are able to participate in it — maybe because it resonates with their own purposelessness and nihilism. It’s appropriate that Kitano’s conquest of America (his ninth film, Brother is the first to be made outside Japan), like Yamamoto’s, should take the form of a studied remaking of gangster tradition in his own terms.

Issue Date: July 26- August 2, 2001