What
would you do if you had only twelve hours to live? That question
is posed by titles at the beginning of Too Tired to
Die, directed by Wonsuk Chin. When the movie starts,
twentysomething Kenji (played by Takeshi Kaneshiro) has a
dream that an Arab boy is being chased through Baghdad by
two soldiers under the command of a woman in a veil. When
he awakens in his New York apartment, his mother calls from
Tokyo to ask him to pick up her friend’s son Yoichiro at JFK
airport. Kenji reminds his mother to send money, which she
promises to do, provided that he will look for a job next
month. In short, handsome, youthful Kenji is trying to find
himself in New York at his mother’s expense. After the telephone
call, he walks to a café to drink coffee. En route, the same
boy in the dream runs into him, trying to escape two men who
are pursuing him on roller skates. He enters the café and
orders, but soon a woman nearly collapses at the entry to
the restaurant, so he quickly gets up, catches her before
she falls, and is holding her while she regains her strength.
He then offers her his coffee and converses, finding out that
she is Pola (played by Geno Lechner), a German woman who lives
in Paris, so he asks her to meet at the café at 6 p.m. for
a date, though she is equivocal because she plans to fly back
to Paris the following day with her boyfriend. While talking,
he sees the same boy running, and he goes into the street
to observe, but an angel (played by Mira Sorvino) appears,
explains that the man has been running for years, kisses Kenji,
leaves a stone to protect him from death, and disappears.
When he returns to the café, Pola is gone, but his friend
Fabrizio (played by Michael Imperioli) is present, and soon
an African American patron (played by Jeffrey Wright) joins
the conversation, opining that "You don’t know about life
until you’ve lived it." After visiting Fabrizio’s apartment
and the Sage Art Gallery, he returns to the café for the date,
which consists of walking to dine at a restaurant and then
going to her hotel room, where her boyfriend is in bed asleep,
so he gives her the stone as a present and leaves. After returning
home for the night, he dreams that the angel is visiting him
and his mother (played by Ako) in Tokyo. Sensing that the
angel brings death, Kenji is rude to her, but his mother insists
on being polite. When he wakes up, the angel appears, this
time for real. The angel tells him that she has come for him;
however, thanks to his help in catching the Arab boy, he has
twelve more hours to live. Kenji then calls his mother, telling
her that she need not send the money. He goes to JFK in search
of the German woman, but she is nowhere to be found, so he
rides back in a taxi along with a young girl who insists that
sex is at the bottom of everything. Then he consults two fortunetellers;
the first provides bullshit, so he takes his money back, but
the second runs off, horrified. Next, he sees Fabrizio at
work and insists that he has something important to say during
his next break. Then he goes to the same art gallery, where
he kisses a Korean girl whom he saw there earlier; the girl
responds passionately and then leaves. When he goes to the
café, the same girl, Anouk (played by Hye Soo Kim), is accompanied
by fifty-eight-year-old John Sage (played by Ben Gazzara).
When Anouk goes to the restroom, Kenji tries to tell Sage
that he should not court someone so young but lets slip his
understanding that he has only a few hours to live. When Anouk
reappears, Sage invites Kenji to a dinner party at his SoHo
apartment that night. After Fabrizio arrives at the café,
Kenji tells him that he will be dying soon, they hug, but
after leaving the café Fabrizio is killed in an auto accident.
Kenji then kills time at a peep show in Times Square and by
conversing with two prostitutes, a woman and a transsexual,
and arrives on time for the party. During the party, Kenji
asks Sage to explain the meaning of life, but Sage cannot
do so. Then Kenji asks for permission to have sex with his
girlfriend Anouk and kisses her, whereupon Sage erupts with
anger, there is a scuffle, Anouk stabs him with a knife, and
Kenji leaves. As he staggers down the street, he lurches toward
onrushing cars but is saved by Yoichiro (played by Masa Sakamaki),
who complains that he did not pick him up at JFK. Then Kenji
goes home and commits hara-kiri. The angel of death arrives,
but Kenji still has a few more minutes to live. Kenji begs
to be taken away then, as he is "too tired to die," whence
the title for the movie. The film is supposed to be a comedy,
laughing at the inevitability of death, and encouraging filmviewers
to live life to the fullest before their death, but the story
is much more somber than Meet Joe Black (1998),
in which Brad Pitt plays Death but gets more involved with
the character that he summons. In Too Tired to Die Death
has emotions of her own in many different encounters and guises
throughout the film but, similar to Joe Black, ultimately
has no choice in her mission. Although Chin, the director,
is trying to demystify death, the fact that Kenji is really
unable to find any diversion or meaning in the twelve hours
speaks volumes about most humans, who know that they will
die someday but do not confront existential questions during
most of their lives. The director selects a Japanese protagonist
because he is fascinated that so many young men from Tokyo
end up in New York unable to get a life. There are so many
rules imposed on young people as they grow up in Japan that
an aimless existence is the antidote for overconformity, but
available only to those with rich parents. Those with terminal
HIV or cancer confront a similar situation, and perhaps if
we really listened to the subtexts of their requests to visit
the ocean or to go to the zoo, we would better attend to their
needs. It is a pity that Too Tired to Die, which
begins with such an important question, simply provides no
wisdom for anyone. MH
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