Giri/Haji, episode 8 review: only this bewitching thriller would mix a bloody climax with a balletic dance sequence
Not many crime dramas would suddenly launch into interpretative dance mid-episode. Fewer still would do it in black-and-white, then flip back to full colour and never acknowledge what just happened. Then again, Giri/Haji (BBC Two) has been no ordinary crime drama.
Writer Joe Barton’s Anglo-Japanese thriller (with a title that translates as Duty/Shame) has bewitched and beguiled for the past seven weeks. As it reached its bittersweet finale, Barton had the audacity to throw in a goosebump-inducing magical sequence which summed up the just-arty-enough ambition of his creation.
Following the arrival of three Yakuza enforcers in London to bring renegade gangster Yuto Mori (Yosuke Kubozuka) back to Tokyo, they took his teenage niece Taki (Aoi Okuyama) hostage and threatened to throw her off a skyscraper unless Yuto handed himself over.
As Taki’s detective father Kenzo (Takehiro Hira) raced to save her, he was accompanied by vengeful Cockney mobster Abbot (Charlie Creed-Miles), with Met officer DC Sarah Weitzmann (Kelly Macdonald) in hot pursuit.
Everyone arrived on the same rooftop, guns drawn, for a stylised Mexican stand-off – until troubled Taki threatened to jump off. In a heartfelt speech, she confessed her own insecurities (“I’m broken. Some days I wake up and feel there’s something in me that’s missing”) and pointed out everyone else’s compromised morals.
They promptly launched into that three-minute chiaroscuro ballet sequence, with characters arriving from Japan and even the afterlife to join in. It was an extraordinary and emotive moment which could teach BBC stablemate Strictly Come Dancing a thing or two about same-sex couples.
Thousands of miles away, the Yakuza turf war came to a head with a so-called peace meeting. Fingers were cut off in atonement but the blood-letting didn’t end there.
Meanwhile, having made it to their rural hideaway with Yuto’s baby, the plucky female trio of Eiko (Anna Sawai), Natsuko (Mitsuko Oka) and Rei (Yūko Nakamura) were tracked down by gangsters – until, in a flurry of bullets, a surprise saviour arrived in the shape of slobby Roy (Tony Way), a Met detective on an exchange programme but with secrets of his own.
This eventful climax took in stabbings, shootings, stolen taxis and crashed cars. In story about love and family loyalty, Yuto got his happy ending but his world-weary elder brother Kenzo didn’t. His was an ambiguous fate, both personally and professionally – realistic, perhaps, but still a slight frustration.
We left Kenzo and Sarah, resigned to their destinies and posed in a final frame that resembled an Edward Hopper painting, gorgeously soundtracked by Barbara Lewis’s neglected 1962 R&B classic Hello Stranger.
This finale was by no means faultless. There wasn’t enough for scene-stealing sex worker and lost soul Rodney (Will Sharpe) to do, yet too much screen time for the sub-Guy Ritchie character of Abbot, who was something of a weak link.
However, I admit a chuckle when Abbot ambushed the Yakuza with a cry of: “Konnichiwa, d---heads!” For comedy value, it was rivalled only when a Japanese cop desperately demanded a phone from a service station cashier, who laconically replied: “Calm down, Chinese E.T.”
Loose ends weren’t entirely tied up. Corpses were left strewn all over two continents. Yet these are minor quibbles. Both hilarious and heartbreaking, it was populated by bravura performances, while Julian Farino’s direction was vivid and virtuosic.
Overall this delightful, decidedly non-Dickensian tale of two cities was an unexpected triumph – up there with Chernobyl, The Virtues and Succession as the year’s best TV drama. It combined the gripping narrative momentum of a police procedural with the inventiveness of an arthouse film. Who needs Scandi-crime when we’ve got sushi-crime?
