Plot
The film opens with Matsuda being uncooperative at school. We learn via a radio broadcast that he then murders his father and runs away on his bike. The next morning a drunken Kurosawa runs him over in his taxi. Feeling guilty about the accident, he is soon driving Matsuda to northern Japan. Matsuda remains uncommunicative and unfriendly.
Aikawa is a convenience store clerk with a son at elementary school and a husband who has abandoned the family after losing his job. Her son fakes illness to avoid school. She later discovers that he is being bullied. She becomes increasingly stressed by financial and family worries, and eventually attempts a bank robbery and kidnaps one of her son's bullies to teach him a lesson.
The middle-aged Yakuza finds that his partner has stolen his boss's money to pay for an operation for his daughter. He is given one week to find his partner and recover the money. He finds and reluctantly executes him, only to steal the money himself and give it to the widow.
He saves Matsuda from suicide, and, recognizing another troubled person on the run, invites him to stay with him at the deserted house he is using. The pair form a friendship like father and son. However, the gangsters track him down and kill him.
Matsuda goes to Hakodate, Hokkaido to trace the Yakuza's estranged daughter, now earning money as a prostitute.
At the end of the film, Kurosawa appears in Hokkaido, carrying a middle-aged female passenger in his taxi. She meets Matsuda on the beach. She may be his mother.
|
||||
Read more about this topic: Border Line
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)