London Film Fest 2011 Day 5 - HARA-KIRI: DEATH OF A SAMURAI

Writer-director Takashi Miike, the master of gory violence, is in altogether more sombre mood with his remake of Masaki Kobayashi's iconic 1962 feature "Harakiri". Takashi Miike's film takes the form of a highly formally controlled, slow-paced, beautifully depicted tragedy.  The form is particularly complex and satisfying - a tale within a tale within a tale, book-ended by acts of wince-inducingly graphic and stunningly choreographed violence.  It is both a personal, family tragedy, and a lament for the unbearable burden that the honour code of the samurai places on its follower.  

The movie is set in seventeenth century Edo, where peace has left the samurai caste impoverished and unemployed. The desperate ronin (samurai without master) apply to local lords to commit ritual suicide in their courtyards "to restore honour", but hoping the lords will pay them to leave.  As the film opens, Hanshiro Tsugumo (Ebizo Ichikawa) is making just such an application and the Senior Retainer warns him not bluff this particular house.  This is the outer layer of the story.  The retainer tells the tale of the previous applicant, Motomo Chijiwa (Eita) whose bluff was called.  The second layer of the tale.  And then, we get to the very heart of the film, Tsugamo's reply to the Retainer, which reveals that he knew Chijiwa well.  In fact, the boy was his son-in-law - husband to an ailing wife and son, desperate for a few pennies for medicine.  

In the telling of the three tales, Takashi Miike depicts with unflinching gaze the truth behind the exotic myth of the samurai - that their fortunes are swept up in wider feudal conflicts - a knife-edge walk between poverty and glory - the lack of humanity in their strict honour code.   This is done not just through the graphic depiction of ritual suicide, but more subtly in the colour palette of the film.  The reality of life is depicted in shades of grey.  Real life is dark, unlit, unwarmed, grim and bleak. This contrasts with the burnished red coat of armour lovingly given pride of place in the courtyard - the only shock of colour in the film, constantly in the glow of candles.  It's as though society has been up-ended, inverted - and the prison-like samurai code is being given the upper hand over life itself.

HARA-KIRI: DEATH OF SAMURAI is an amazing film.  Moving, never melodramatic despite the tragedy, formally beautiful, with set pieces that are unbearably tense and vividly depicted.  It is not the typical film one has come to expect from Takashi Miike and his long-time fans may be disappointed at its serious, almost lyrical tone. But I found it to be his best, most mature, most artistic work to date.  The only quibble is that the 3D adds very little to the experience. 

HARA-KIRI: DEATH OF A SAMURAI played Cannes 2011 where it was the first film to be shown in 3D.  It opened in Japan on October 15th and opens in France on November 30th.

Late Late review - London Film Fest 2010 Day 11 - 13 ASSASSINS

13 ASSASSINS is a fantastic film. I literally bounced out of the cinema having watched it! On one level it's a brilliantly lavish Samurai film in the classic mould - beautiful costumes, whole villages created as sets, codes of honour broken, elegantly choreographed sword-fighting - and it reminded me how much I loved Samurai films. On another level, it's typical Takashi Miike mischief - satirising the violence of Samurai movies with a level of gore and blood that is quite simply ridonkulous - and making the village idiot actually a better sword-fighter than the pompous Samurai.

The plot is straight out of Shogun Total War 2. It's mid 19th century Japan with the Shogunate on its last legs but still rich enough to hire Shinzaemon (Kôji Yakusho) to assassinate the evil pretender, Lord Naritsugu (Gorô Inagaki). The first half of the film is a Kurosawa style "putting the band back together" narrative, with the cool twist of having Yusuke Iseya play the provincial dolt who gains a place alongside his hard-core Samurai team-mates. And in the second half of the flick, they turn the town of Ochiai into an A-Team style booby-trap setting up a brutal, bloody massacre.

The first thing to say about 13 ASSASSINS is that it looks amazing. The production design is lavish in style and flawless in its period detail, creating a look typically associated with epic historical drama. The photography (Nobuyasu Kita) echoes this lavish style with Kubrick-like deliberate framing and slow, stylised camera movements. Interior scenes are lit by candelight to give an authentic feel and the detail of the costumes is breath-taking. The second thing to say is that beyond the historic detail, Takashi Miike remains the Director of the Egregious - from the audacious sadism of Naritsugu (e.g. the women crippled so extremely by "total massacre") -  to the egregious and dogmatic code of honour of Shinzaemon -  to the balletic, operatic, monumental final display of bloodshed in the village. Miike creates a film that is utterly modern in its gorging, self-indulgent, obese display of blood and violence - but also a film that is curiously nostalgic for the age of the Samurai when that bloodshed was part of a self-sacrifice for honour. His film is, then, a bravura performance - modern, nostalgic, bloody, but with depth. Undoubtedly one of the finest films of the London Film Festival.

13 ASSASSINS played Venice and Toronto 2010 and was released in Japan in September. It opens in the UK in May 2011.

BIG BANG LOVE/46-OKUNEN NO KOI - dull homo-erotic J-thriller

And now from Takashi Miike - the acclaimed director of cult horror and social satire AUDITION and ICHI THE KILLER, we get BIG BANG LOVE - JUVENILE A. Catchy title that. And yet that's about as acccessible as this homo-erotic J-thriller gets. BIG BANG LOVE is set far in the future - a future that looks like a Tate Modern sculpted version of today and features a cast almost exclusively populated by beautifully sculpted young Japanese men, moodily lit in ochre and red and shot intimately on Super 16. The plot has more than a hint of noir. Two men are put in prison for unrelated crimes. One is a gay bartender whose frenzied attack on a sexual predator was too gruesome to be classed as self-defense. He forms a crush on another inmate - an ueber-violent youth who raped the prison warden's wife. The rapist is found strangled and the bartender confesses. But who really did it and why? The plot may be simple, if not entirely comprehensible - check out the final murder motive! - and moves in circles around itself. The dialogue is similarly eliptical to the point of obfuscation. Added to this you have the odd sequence of modern dance and a lot of the prison scenes look like they have been blocked out on a theatre stage. In short, this is not a movie designed to be accessible and as much as I enjoyed the surreal visuals and sheer beauty of the framing, after a while I grew bored. The 85 minute run-time seemed like forever.

BIG BANG LOVE opened in Japan this summer.

HOSTEL - not scary, occasionally amusing

HOSTEL is a movie written and directed by Eli Roth, but "presented by Quentin Tarantino". I have no problems with friends bigging up each others work, but Tarantino should be aware that he risks devaluing his "brand name" by attaching it to this deeply inferior horror movie. Believe me when I say that I have a very low tolerance for horror: creepy, gory, nasty stuff freaks me out. But I was not scared once by HOSTEL. Worse still, I had a vague feeling of having watched a lot of the scenes that were meant to scare me before, and done better. (I am not accusing HOSTEL of ripping these films off - just of not being terribly innovative.) In particular, people who have seen the wonderful Japanese horror flick, AUDITION, or more recently, SYMPATHY FOR MR VENGEANCE will find HOSTEL very very weak indeed.

All of this is a bit of a shame because the story is actually pretty neat. Two American backpackers are travelling through Europe with an Icelander they just met. Their two main preoccupations are getting laid and getting high. A dodgy Dutch pimp recommends a hostel near Bratislava where there are willing chicks on-tap thanks to the fact that all the guys in Slovakia are away at war (huh?). So they go to the hostel, get laid, get high and then bad things involving torture chambers start to happen. For me, the problem is in the execution. Eli Roth just completely failed to build up any tension, or any sense of threat to the key protagonist. That's not to say that the movie is a complete waste of time. Certainly some of the early scenes have a degree of comedy value, not least when they feature Eythor Gudjonsson as Oli the Icelander a.k.a The King of Swing. Rick Hoffman also has a hillarious cameo as a sinister, hyper-active Yuppie in search of gothic kicks. However, any movie wherein a bunch of bumble-gum chewing eight-year olds with koshes are the key menace, is not to be taken seriously.

HOSTEL is on release in the US, UK and France. It hits Germany and Austria on April 27th 2006.