Something to watch tonight: Monday 21 July

Giri/Haji (Barton, 2019)

Monday would normally be the day I cover new releases but – like last week and next – I’m prioritising those for RNZ At the Movies with the occasional early draft of history on RNZ Nights. Links and extracts will be posted here on Thursday.

In the meantime, I want to celebrate the “to watch” list which proved useful last week as I realise that six years was long enough for Giri/Haji to languish there. The show was a Netflix/BBC co-production (which was a bit of a fashion at the time) and was first broadcast by the BBC in October 2019 before landing on Netflix in the rest of the world in early 2020.

We’re suckers for Japan-themed thrillers here at F&S and Giri/Haji is a very decent one. Tokyo detective Kenzo (Takehiro Hira) is in a funk after his brother goes bad and is presumed dead at the hands of one of the local Yakuza clans. His dad is dying of cancer, his teenage daughter is almost out of control and his wife and mother-in-law appear to be perpetually disappointed in him.

A murder in London with a Yakuza sword – a short blade but no less symbolic than a Samurai sword – leads Kenzo’s boss to think that the brother, Yuto (Yōsuke Kubozuka), might not be as dead as everyone assumes. In order to avert a Yakuza war, Kenzo is sent to London unofficially to try and bring Yuto back before the clans or the Metropolitan Plod track him down.

In London, Kenzo meets local detective Sarah (Kelly Macdonald) and half-Japanese and half-British rent boy Rodney (Will Sharpe) who both get embroiled in the increasingly turbulent plot. The show flicks back and forth between London and Tokyo as tensions look like getting out of control and several characters take turns to become the proverbial ‘fish out of water’.

There are two things I want to highlight after we breezed through the eight episode limited series. Firstly, the plot becomes less important as we go along and the themes of inter- (and intra) generational disappointment grow. Everyone in the show seems to be failing to live up to expectations somehow, but unable to break free from those expectations and live a different, but more authentic, life.

The second observation is that Giri/Haji appears to have been the launchpad for several big careers. The look on our faces when we realised that the Will Sharpe so authentically inhabiting the sarcastic Rodney is also the diligent tour guide in Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain was, I’m sure, something to behold. He went from Giri/Haji to the second season of The White Lotus (which I haven’t seen) and is now back on Netflix in Lena Dunham’s new comedy Too Much.

I’ve been around long enough that I shouldn’t be surprised when actors disappear into roles like that but it’s still a minor miracle when they do.

Takehiro Hira went from this to Monarch: Legacy of Monsters and Shōgun, as did Wellington-born Anna Sawai, although she added a powerful turn in the Apple TV+ show Pachinko.

Kelly Macdonald is like Melanie Lynskey in that she improves everything she is involved with – I must write something about her remarkable career at some point – but the most fun performance in the show is Charlie Creed-Miles as the East End gangster Abbott, stealing every scene he’s in.

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Where to watch Giri/Haji