Twilight Samurai
(Tasogare Seibei)
Dir.
Yoji Yamada
STARRING
Hiroyuki Sanada - Seibei Iguchi
Rie Miyazawa - Tomoe Iinuma
Ren Osugi - Toyotarou Kouda
Mitsuru Fukikoshi - Michinojo Iinuma
RUNNING TIME: 2 hours 9 minutes
LANGUAGE: Japanese: Subtitled in English
Programme Notes
YOJI YAMADA was born in Osaka on September 13, 1931, Yamada was raised in Manchuria andreturned to Japan in 1947. He studied Law at Tokyo University from 1949. While there, he helped run a film club. After graduating in 1954, he took an entrance exam for both Shochiku and Nikkatsu; he was accepted into the latter company, but was sent over to Shochiku because of over-staffing at Nikkatsu. His 1969 film, TORA-SAN, OUR LOVABLE TRAMP launched the TORA-SAN series that he continued directing on an average of two TORA-SAN series each year until 1996 when the lead actor Atsumi Kiyoshi died at the age of 68. This was the most popular and profitable asset of Shochiku's. Of the 48 TORA-SAN films produced, Yamada directed all but two of them. Yamada won a Japanese Academy Award for one of these works in 1977 and Atsumi received a Special Prize from the Academy in 1980. The actual title of the series is IT'S TOUGH BEING A MAN (Otoko Wa Tsuraiyo) but the movies are usually referred to by the name of Atsumi's character, Tora San. The formula, which was a combination of road movie, romance, comedy and nostalgia, guaranteed box-office success every time.
The Twilight Samurai is set in the late nineteen century as the feudal Shogun
period was giving way to the Meiji Restoration, Seibei Iguchi (Hiroyuki Sanada)
is a low-ranking samurai of the Unasaka clan in Shonai Province of northeast
Japan. His wife has died of tuberculosis, and with two daughters, Kayano and
Ito, and an elderly mother to support, he and his family must survive in austerity.
The moment his daily work as a clerk in one of the clans warehouses is over,
he hurries home, refusing to drink or eat with fellow samurai. Behind his back,
his fellow samurai teasingly call him "Tasogare Seibei (Twilight Seibei)."
The divorce of his childhood friend Tomoe (Rie Miyazawa) leads him into a confrontation
with her violent ex-husband, a high-ranking samurai. When word of Seibei's easy
victory using only a wooden sword begins to circulate, his reputation for swordfighting
prowess begins to change his colleagues' assessment of him. Just as Seibei begins
to dream that despite his impoverishment he might win the hand of the long loved
Tomoe, he is caught in the shifting turmoil of the times and is assigned, against
his wishes, by his superiors to confront and kill a renowned warrior on the
wrong side of a clan power struggle.
Hollywood and the rest of the Western world have long been fascinated by the
samurai, fearless warriors from Japan's feudal past. A big part of that fascination
has been their code of honor, known as "bushido". Based on Zen and
Confucian wisdom, the principles of courage, honesty, courtesy, honor, compassion,
loyalty and complete sincerity, are strictly adhered to. After the Second World
War, these principles were associated with kamikaze pilots and Japan's wartime
hostility. In Frank Capra's 1945 propaganda movie,
Japan: Know Your Enemy, bushido is described as "the art of treachery".
Since then, however, samurai movies have served as a useful bridge between the
US and Japan. In fact, bearing in mind that the real samurai class was officially
abolished more than 30 years before the invention of cinema, most of what the
US know about samurai it knows from the movies.
In Japan, there was no such thing as a "samurai movie" before the
Second World War - although it was making plenty of jidaigeki, or historical
movies, and, given that samurai had been a big part of society for more than
1,000 years, it would have been very difficult to leave them out. When the American
occupation Government took over at the end of the war, it limited production
of jidaigeki, fearing that they could re-ignite Japanese nationalism. Especially
forbidden was the depiction of samurai swords, which were closely associated
with feudal loyalty.
But, by 1950, Japan's film industry had returned to normal and was starting
to make an international impact. This was largely thanks to one director: Akira
Kurosawa. His Rashomon opened the doors in 1950, but Seven Samurai, four years
later, laid out the vocabulary of the modern samurai movie. The director was
descended from a famous samurai family, and his father wore the samurai topknot
when he was a boy. His seven samurai are noble, honorable, virtuous heroes.
But much as Kurosawa loved the samurai, he also loved John Ford and Howard Hawks.
It's debatable how authentically "Japanese" Seven Samurai is - Japanese
critics certainly attacked it for being "too western". But it was
a huge international hit, and Kurosawa followed it up with several more - Yojimbo,
Sanjuro, The Hidden Fortress - all using his signature actor Toshiro Mifune.
What followed was a period of cross-fertilization between westerns and samurai
movies. Their heroes were similarly rootless loners, operating in similarly
romanticized versions of their country's histories, with similarly black-and-white
views of good and evil. Their themes and stories (and, of course, their weapons)
were interchangeable. Rashomon, Seven Samurai and Yojimbo were remade, respectively,
as The Outrage, The Magnificent Seven and A Fistful of Dollars. French director
Jean-Pierre Melville translated bushido to 1960s France in his noir masterpiece
Le Samouraï, with Alain Delon as a solitary hit man whose samurai-like
values appear pathological in 1960s Paris. In more recent times, Jim Jarmusch's
Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai successfully fused Japanese warrior sensibilities
with those of urban America. And Cartoon Network's hit series Samurai Jack has
been bringing bushido to pre-school kids worldwide.
But the Hollywood product that has perpetuated samurai values more than any
other is Star Wars. George Lucas is a Kurosawa devotee and has admitted borrowing
plot elements from The Hidden Fortress. But there is also more than a hint of
samurai about the Jedi, a noble order of warriors who spout Zen-like wisdom,
follow an ancient code and fight with swords (Lucas cottoned on to the limitations
of gun action well ahead of the pack). Even the word "Jedi" was inspired
by Lucas hearing the word jidaigeki. And before Alec Guinness took the role,
an early choice for Obi-Wan Kenobi was Mifune.
While Hollywood quietly adopted the samurai, Japan turned Kurosawa's mould into
a whole genre. Pulp samurai movies were churned out in 1960s and 1970s Japan,
usually recycling existing legends, historical incidents and previous samurai
films. Many took as their subject Miyamoto Musashi, a real-life 17th-century
folk hero. The original Zatoichi, the blind swordsman, was played by one actor,
Shintaro Katsu, over dozens of movies from 1962 until 1989. As much as Kurosawa,
it is these gory but populist movies that Tarantino makes reference to in Kill
Bill.
By the 1980s that craze was over and the cash-strapped Japanese film industry
drifted away from the samurai into gun-toting yakuza movies. Since then, there
has been little appetite for a samurai action revival. Nagisa Oshima's 1999
drama Gohatto offered an arthouse, homoerotic revision of samurai history, but
Japanese youth have tended to associate samurai movies with their parents.
With two major Japanese productions that have both struck a chord domestically
and internationally - Yoji Yamada's box office and critical success (12 Japanese
Film Academy awards) Twilight Samurai, followed by Takeshi Kitano's update of
Zatoichi - coinciding with Hollywood productions "The Last Samurai"
and the samurai-influenced "Kill Bill," there is no question the samurai
is back.
Adapted from The Guardian (UK) "The
Way of the Warrior," October 10, 2003