Life Moves: Giri / Haji on Netflix
By Kaija Pepper
I have a folder on my desk for press releases and brochures about upcoming dance shows. For the first time in decades, it’s empty, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. So I’m watching more TV than usual, binging on Netflix crime dramas. Just as those predictably violent plots began to become wearisome, I noticed Giri / Haji (Duty / Shame), a 2019 BBC series set in Tokyo and London. It looked different — and it was, with bilingual (Japanese and English) dialogue and graphic novel-style recaps opening each instalment. Even more unusual: Toward the end of the final episode, the plot takes a surreal dive into the depths of the subconscious through contemporary dance.
The story features detective Kenzo Mori (Takehiro Hira); his brother Yuto (Yôsuke Kubozuka), on the run from a yakuza gang; and his teenage daughter, Taki (Aoi Okuyama). Unhappy at school, Taki has run away from her Tokyo home to join her father in London, where he’s looking for Yuto. There, Taki makes new friends, including a woman with whom she explores her sexuality.
The set-up to the dance scene is Taki’s kidnapping by the yakuza, who threaten to throw her off the top of a building unless Yuto comes out of hiding. He races to her rescue. So does Kenzo, joined by Sarah, a detective he’s close to, and a London crime boss; the latter opens negotiations as they burst onto the roof with: “Konnichiwa, dickheads.” Guns are drawn.
Before violence erupts, Taki escapes and runs to the rooftop’s edge. As she lurches toward the abyss, good guys and bad instinctively rush toward her. Kenzo grabs Taki’s wrist and, with the weight of the others anchoring him, pulls her to safety — and then into a black-and-white world with an elegiac soundtrack where the dance seems to naturally unfold.
The choreography by Liam Steel (a freelance British director and choreographer) features duets in which characters either lift or run to or away from each other, expressing relationships we’ve become familiar with. The yakuza have disappeared, while additional family and friends appear out of nowhere. Kenzo’s wife forms a trio with him and Taki, the parents supporting their child just as Taki yearns for. The dead grandfather rushes past Kenzo, his oldest son, to embrace Yuto, the favourite. Finally, as movement fills the rooftop, everyone freezes as the camera circles round and seems to sweep Taki back to the edge. Reality — the film’s reality, that is — returns, and the story races to its conclusion.
My heart lifted as the three-minute dance played out. None of the actors appeared to be trained dancers, so it wasn’t their technical prowess that impressed. It was the way the dance took the action into a deeper realm of emotional transparency and vulnerability.
In an interview at Crime Files, series creator Joe Barton described his desire to go beyond just another shoot-out to resolve the scene. Also, he didn’t want the characters “to suddenly be able to express themselves verbally because I see it as a story about people who feel a lot of things but don’t have the words for them. I just thought that this was a way of having them put out their innermost wants and desires without ever actually saying the words.”
The soul-baring dance was a radical departure from the cool grittiness of much crime drama. It left me pining even more for theatres to re-open, so I can sit down once again with my fellow Vancouverites for that irreplaceable live dance experience.
