THE HUNTER AND THE HUNTED

True cop and crook friendships are a rarity - in the movies at least. Plenty of on-screen cops take a familiar, even roughly affectionate approach with the baddies, but few exchange confidences or unburden their souls. That would make them look ridiculous - a fatal flaw in a hard-boiled hero. But Sekikawa is soft-boiled. That is, he is too good for this corrupt world - or perhaps I should say the cop trade. Since the death of his wife, he has been too busy taking care of his young daughter Misaki to devote himself the expected 110 percent to his job. When a thief rips off a local factory, the cops are baffled, until Sekikawa comes across a grizzled middle-aged man kindly fixing Misaki’s bike - and discovers a clue from the robbery in his tool box. Reluctantly, he takes out his badge... The Good Samaritan, it turns out, is one Nekoda, a.k.a. “Neko (The Cat)” - a master thief who knows all of his interrogators’ tricks.Instead of trying new ones, Sekikawa thanks him for helping his daughter and apologizes for arresting him. Touched by the cop’s sincerity and contrition - a first in his line of work - Neko decides to spill. Sekikawa is a department hero. The narrative heart of The Hunter and the Hunted is the bond between Sekikawa and Neko. The latter decides to take the former under his wing and make a real crook-catcher out of him. Little do both know that this apprenticeship will last for years - and dramatically change their lives. This may sound like sentimental hokum - hands across the legal waters and all that - but first-time director Izuru Narushima presents this unusual friendship more in the style of bickering screwball comedy than warm-hearted Japanese TV drama. The film, however, is mainly a showcase for its two leads. The closest the Japanese film industry has come to Tom Hanks, Yakusho Koji doesn’t stretch very far as Sekikawa, a role that plays straight to his nice-guy image. Nonetheless, his Sekikawa is more than a lovable naif, showing flashes of professional steel under his rumpled exterior. He is overshadowed, though, by Emoto Akira, a veteran character actor with a tired-looking mug who usually plays gray-toned, world-weary types (though he is probably best known abroad as the eccentric doctor in Imamura Shohei’s Dr. Akagi.) In Neko, he creates a character more multicolored than usual - not the standard thief-with-a-heart-of-gold, but something deeper, richer, even mysterious. For his Neko is a trickster sage, who exudes a hard-earned, if comically anti-social, wisdom. “I want to a be a first-class thief until I die”, he says. “I’m taking care of my health so I can still do this when I’m 100”. Given the state of pension systems in Japan and elsewhere, that might be a sensible goal for all of us.