GIRI/HAJI Review
GIRI/HAJI, meaning Duty/Shame in Japanese, is a new BBC Two eight-episode crime drama on every Thursday evening at 9 PM, or you can watch the whole series over on iPlayer. The story centres around a Tokyo detective, Kenzo Mori, who is sent to scour London for his gangster brother, Yuto Mori, who was assumed to be dead until a Yakuza boss’s nephew is murdered, starting a gang war. The cast includes Takehiro Hira as Kenzo, Yosuke Kubozuka as Yuto, Kelly Macdonald as Sarah Weitzmann, a Detective Constable alienated within the Metropolitan Police, Will Sharpe as Rodney, a drug addicted rent boy, and Aoi Okuyama as Taki, Kenzo’s sixteen-year-old rebellious daughter. There is also an array of other brilliant characters, including Kenzo’s wife, Rei, and mother, Natsuko, and Yuto’s girlfriend, Eiko, who we come to know later on in the series as we follow their journey trying to escape the Yakuza.
The characters are all complex and well-developed; you aren’t necessarily supposed to like them, they all have massive flaws which are intricately revealed throughout the series, but you come to love them. Kenzo is the protagonist of the series and faces some immensely difficult decisions involving the capture of his brother, while simultaneously fighting his own demons and crippling loneliness. Sarah shares his feeling of isolation, her colleagues all extremely hostile towards her, though we don’t discover why until later in the series, forcing the audience to build up their own assumptions about what it is that she has done. For me, Sarah was the most difficult character to like, but it was her interactions with Rodney that truly saved her character for me as you see her trying to protect and help him as much as Kenzo, though you could argue Rodney might not deserve it. Will Sharpe is brilliant as Rodney, he offers just enough hilarity for a bit of comic relief, without distracting from the seriousness of his dire situation. When Taki turns up in London, suffering from loneliness like her father, Rodney makes her feel included and loved. He’s not the best role model, no, but the scenes they share together are some of my favourites and I truly felt invested in their characters.
I found the first couple of episodes quite slow in pace, possibly because there were quite a few characters to introduce, however, by the end of the second episode I couldn’t help but binge watch the whole series. This isn’t an easy watch; having re-watched the first two episodes with my Ma (bless her), she found it difficult to follow at times (as did I on first viewing) and we had to pause a couple of times for me to explain what was happening. However, this is the point, not everything is supposed to be clear, the audience almost fulfil the role of detective as they piece together past events and the relationships between characters, and you feel a sense of reward and intrigue in the process. A few moments could be written off as slightly too coincidental but sometimes this is needed to fuel the plot and push characters together. Some people have argued that the series should have been condensed into four episodes, but I strongly disagree as you need the time to flesh out the characters and their pasts, to come to know them, and understand the politics and multiple agendas involved. If anything, the series ended a bit too abruptly for me, I felt I needed another episode that gave me an insight into the characters lives in the aftermath of events.
From the very first episode of the series, the cinematography and snippets of animation are breathtakingly beautiful. The music, featuring taiko drumming, adds to the atmosphere and tone created by the visuals, blending the traditional with modern fast-paced action. The final episode also features a stunning dance scene involving the whole cast, which some may find slightly bizarre, but I was blown away by the beauty and craft of this sudden interruption; it was something completely unpredictable, nothing I had ever seen in a tv programme before, never mind an English crime series. The dance depicts in one continuous shot the journey of the characters throughout the series, it is a moment of reflection, something that wouldn’t have worked if the series had been reduced to four episodes. I can only imagine how long this scene took to perfect, and some may argue that it seems out of place, but I completely disagree; the juxtaposition created by this dance scene and the action sequences challenges the conventions of genre, one typically starved of emotion, and beautifully presents the important themes and significant moments of conflict between the characters. Every aspect of this series made me feel as if I was in the cinema, not watching at home on my television, and it is worthy of the same praise and recognition.
Here are a couple of great Tweets from people who also enjoyed the series, if you are like me and love reading a variety of opinions:
@naomimcpartlan
As a half Japanese/English girl in London who loves a good crime drama, it truly feels like #GiriHaji was made for me, it speaks to my soul.
@grimeshelby
#GiriHaji is ART. Just finished binge watching, it was brilliant. The acting, the writing, that dance sequences in the finale, beautiful.
@Stuart_Hepburn If there’s been a better bit of acting this year than Will Sharpe in #GiriHaji I’d like to know what it is. He comes across like a refugee from an illicitly filmed fly on the wall documentary. Outstanding.
@thomprobert Just finished #GiriHaji and the last ep contains the most beautiful twenty minutes of tv drama I’ve ever seen. Sad all those fabulous characters are now leaving my life. Extraordinary.
@arewetehbaddies “You’re not dead, you’re in a fucking Uber.” #GiriHaji