Fireworks stars Asian TV superstar and comic idol Takeshi Kitano (a.k.a. Beat Takeshi) as Nishi, a retired detective whose wife (Kayoko Kishimoto) has contracted a terminal illness. To pay her medical expenses, he has borrowed heavily from yakuza hoods, who now demand payment in full. He decides on the only means at hand--bank robbery--to settle the debt and provide his wife with one last vacation. With fellow cops and yakuza enforcers on their trail, the couple wend their way from Mt. Fuji to a haunting resolution on a quiet beach.

The synopsis reads like standard cop-show fare, but anyone expecting John Woo-style thrills will sit dumbfounded by the movie's elliptical storytelling leaps, its almost subliminally understated slapstick, and its flashback-dense structure, which switches without notice from present to past. (Hint: Nishi's wearing sunglasses in the present.) The action scenes in Fireworks, when not relayed in bloody slow motion or half-remembered bursts, are comically terse. A Kitano knife fight offers no warning or build-up, just the hero inexplicably wrapping his jacket around his arm, the sound of offscreen struggle, a flash of shadow-boxing, and a sprawled attacker.

The threat of violence doesn't loom over the movie, however, as much as the constant awareness of mortality and the passage of time. The silent, affectionate scenes between Nishi and his wife are ruminative, not urgent: There's no sense of an imposed deadline or climax, just the gentle savoring of each moment, which is made all the more precious by the inevitability of its end. In a parallel story--the flower to the central plot's (gun)fire--Nishi's wheelchair-bound partner (Ren Osugi) is awakened from suicidal depression by transformative visions of lilies and pansies, which inspire him to paint obsessively. (Kitano, who wrote, directed, and edited, did the paintings as well.)

Fireworks is the first of Takeshi Kitano's seven movies to be released here, although Quentin Tarantino's Miramax imprint Rolling Thunder just issued the director's 1993 film Sonatine almost simultaneously. I'd like to see them all. As director, Kitano resembles a cross between Jacques Tati and the Japanese filmmaker Seijun Suzuki, whose absurdly stylized mid-'60s gangster thrillers (Tokyo Drifter, Branded to Kill) are dazzling head-scratchers. Onscreen, his lopsided smile, rumpled look, and shuffling walk call to mind Charlie Chaplin as Columbo--albeit a Columbo who can wipe out a car full of assassins in less than a second.

Fireworks is demanding viewing--I enjoyed it a lot more the second time, when the characters and the chronology became much clearer--but its inversion of the cop movie's usual ratio of nine parts bullets to one part humanity is unexpectedly moving. It's a flower that burns.