Television Review: Giri/Haji (2019)

When the talents brought by someone's quality are combined with the resources brought by someone's quantity, the results can be truly impressive. One example of this could be the collaboration between the BBC, the British state broadcaster which enjoys—though nowadays not so justified—the status of the best television in the world, and Netflix, considered the most propulsive television house largely thanks to its tireless stamping out of original content. Their latest co-production is Giri/Haji, a crime mini-series that, after its premiere on the BBC, became globally available to Netflix subscribers.

The title in Japanese means "Duty/Shame", and these are precisely the feelings between which the protagonist finds himself: Tokyo police detective Kenzo Mori (Takehiro Hira), whom duty compels to consistently enforce the law and service rules at work, while traditional values dictate that he share a roof with his elderly parents, wife, and rebellious 16-year-old daughter Taki (Aoi Okuyama). A dark stain in his life has been his "problematic" younger brother Yuto (Yosuke Kubozuka), whom he managed to get out of trouble several years ago by covering up evidence of involvement in a bloody robbery of bookmakers linked to the yakuza. Yuto subsequently disappeared and was considered dead, but Kenzo's debts from the past come due after a murder that happened on the other side of the world. A prominent yakuza is killed in his elite London flat, which, as a reaction, sparks a bloody war between feuding yakuza families on the streets of Tokyo. Kenzo's superiors see the solution to the problem as bringing the perpetrator of the murder to justice, and clues suggest that it could be Yuto himself, and that Kenzo might be able to do it in the most elegant and discreet way. Kenzo is therefore sent to London under the pretext of attending a seminar on forensic techniques led by Scotland Yard detective Sarah Weitzman (Kelly Macdonald). Kenzo doesn't find his feet very well in the foreign city at first, but help appears in the form of Rodney (Will Sharpe), a young Londoner of Japanese descent who earns his living as a male prostitute.

Giri/Haji is made in an 8-episode format, which has recently proven ideal for projects of this type—the complicated plot is almost epic in scale, with time to explore and utilise numerous subplots and characters, while on the other hand the story moves relatively quickly, mostly without unnecessary dragging out. Joe Barton's script, however, keeps the action flowing regardless of what is happening simultaneously in Tokyo and London, and despite being interwoven with numerous flashbacks reaching several decades into the past. What seems refreshing in the series is that one of the classic motifs of police films—the protagonist forced to navigate a foreign city like "a fish out of water"—is used in such a way that the protagonist belongs to an Asian, even in this globalised age "exotic" culture, and the "normal" Western environment is observed from his standpoint. Barton, however, also shows how these differences can be bridged and that members of different cultures, worldviews, and sexual orientations can not only collaborate together, but even become a kind of temporary family, for which the best illustration is the scene in which Detective Weitzman explains the tradition of the Jewish Yom Kippur to her new friends. The script also uses large doses of black humour; that is, Giri/Haji contains a series of unusual characters, and even those burdened with clichés, like the rebellious and almost tragically irresponsible brat Taki, can count on being portrayed by rather spirited members of the cast. Giri/Haji was also very well directed, with the tandem of Julian Farino and Ben Chessell using numerous opportunities to experiment with styles. Thus, split-screen techniques are used, extreme widescreen is used for flashback scenes, and the animation that follows the narration of characters explaining what could happen to them deserves special praise.

Eight episodes provide opportunities for a lot of interesting and intriguing content, which were mostly utilised, but also opportunities for some of the script's shortcomings to come to light. This could be said for Barton's use of brutal and quite explicit violence, as well as a tendency to eliminate characters without too much sentimentality, but also without overly rational motives for elimination. This in the penultimate episode creates one of the most dramatic and at times quite unsettling cliffhangers, but its resolution in the final episode turns into melodrama, even a black-humoured deus ex machina which in the final episode brings salvation to some of the protagonists and which in any other case would have worked perfectly must be compromised by additional and not very convincing complications. However, what will stand out the most is the moment when in a key scene the "normal" action stops so that all the protagonists find themselves in a black-and-white film where they perform ballet steps. Although "wackiness" in itself shouldn't be a problem, in Giri/Haji this diversion into "artsy fartsy" waters, which otherwise serves no purpose, cannot be understood other than as snobbish affectation or uninspired self-parody. Nevertheless, despite that, the overall impression of this British series is more than positive, and we can hope that the BBC and Netflix will continue their fruitful collaboration.a

RATING: 7/10 (+++)

(Note: The text in the original Croatian version is available here.)

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