recordkeeping duties of Seibei and his co-workers are more in line with what one might expect of civil servants rather than the stereotypi- cal samurai. As in his previous films, Yamada is interested in depicting the relationships between people and the strength of families. He also seems to want to deflate the cinematic myth of the samurai. Indeed, Seibei does not in the least cut a dashing figure. He is poor, unkempt, and works the Tokugawa equivalent of a stuffy office job. His family even has to do manual labour, like making wooden insect cages, to try to make more money. More importantly, though, he is a well-meaning father who tries hard and encourages his eldest daughter to learn the Confucian classics. He loves his daughters and watching them grow, and refuses to be as miserable, as many would think his circumstances would dictate, and hence turns down an offer of an arranged marriage.
Although Seibei and Tomoe are of the samurai class, the film shows how they, too, were constrained by the class system. Even though Seibei was supposedly on the top, the film demonstrates that this does not necessarily translate into material well-being. The film evidences a social conscience as well: Seibei’s eldest daughter, in voice-over, mentions that Tomoe said that the reason they could live as samurai was due to the hard work of the peasants. In some ways, Seibei would
the twilight
samurai
Tasogare Seibei
studio: Shochiku director: Yoji Yamada producesr: Hiroshi Fukazawa Shigehiro Nakagawa Ichiro Yamamoto screenwriters: Yoji Yamada Yoshitaka Asama cinematographer: Mutsuo Naganuma art director: Yoshinobu Nishioka composer: Isao Tomita editor: Iwao Ishii duration: 128 minutes cast: Hiroyuki Sanada Rie Miyazawa Nenji Kobayashi year: 2002much rather be a peasant – he says that if possible he would leave the samurai life to become a farmer. However, even though Seibei and his family are poor, they are not in imminent danger of starvation – unlike some of the corpses that sometimes appear floating down the river. Yamada plays with audience expectations as well. After overcoming so much, Seibei’s daughter tells the audience in voice-over that there was no happy ending for the family. A few years after Seibei married Tomoe, Seibei was shot and killed during the Boshin War (which led to the Meiji Restoration). Tomoe took the two daughters to Tokyo, where they lived and she supported them. It is concluded that in spite of everything that happened they were happy as a family and that she is proud to have had such a strong, loving father.
Brian ruh
Synopsis
A lone ronin comes to a desolate town that has been torn apart by duelling criminal gangs. Caught inbetween are the helpless towns- people so the ronin offers his services as a bodyguard (yojimbo) to both of the bosses, and soon he has them set to destroy each other. By careful manoeuvring and desperate swordplay, the ronin attempts to force a mutually-destructive showdown.
yojimbo
studio:
Kurosawa Films
director:
Akira Kurosawa
Critique
After the contemporary drama of The Bad Sleep Well (1960), Kurosawa returned to the chambara genre with Yojimbo. In many ways, it was a return to form and, once again, he crafted a film that went on to become not only a worldwide success but an inspiration to countless other films. Sergio Leone’s ‘Man with No Name’ series is the closest example, and the character of Toshiro Mifune’s ronin is readily present in Clint Eastwood’s equally iconic cowboy drifter. Like Eastwood, Mifune would go on to play the same character in at least two other pictures: Sanjuro (1962) and Incident at Blood Pass (1970), and he would also appear in an altered version of this persona in Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo (1970).
Drawing his own inspiration from the work of crime novelist Dashiell Hammett, whose The Glass Key and Red Harvest have been cited as the underlying foundations of the film, Kurosawa crafted a story along the lines of the classic Hollywood Western. It is easy to draw parallels between Yojimbo and Shane (1953) and also the films of John Ford. A stranger enters a god-forsaken town locked in conflict between two factions, where both sides are equally bad and repugnant, and the audience welcomes the swathe of destruction that the hero creates as he exacts justice. There is something inherently appealing about this scenario. It speaks to a desire latent within all of us: that some agency will come and clean up the mess that we have made of our society. Kurosawa’s film eschews tragedy and melodrama and strikes out to create a wry action-packed black comedy. Where the heroes of the Western stood for some higher moral authority, Mifune’s ronin is an amoral opportunist. He may fight for what is ‘right’ but does not do so out of any great sense of purpose and acts merely because the bad should be punished, and he might be able to profit from it.
The opening shot of Yojimbo establishes the locale as a dog strides across the screen carrying a severed hand in its mouth. The grotesque aspects build from there and the various gangsters and thugs show themselves to be an assortment of monsters made flesh. There are giants and craven cowards, men and women who are thirsty for blood and violence. The townsfolk, like the farmers of Seven Samurai (1954), are not idealized portraits as they, too, suffer from the malaise of their environment. However, they are not prone to violence and whatever wrong they do is minor in comparison to the rapacious nature of the thugs. Amongst these is Tatsuya Nakadai, who plays the only man with a firearm in the town. He has a clear advantage over the sword- wielding Mifune and their showdown is a tense standoff, with Nakadai at his villainous best. In these duelling gangs it is also possible to see aspects of the Cold War conflict. One side can be read as the Soviet Union and the other as the United States, with Mifune standing in for post-war Japan. Kurosawa points at the nuclear proliferation and the policy of assured mutual destruction and exposes them as absurd pur- suits. That he chooses as his hero a man who is as bad as any of the villains shows the director to once more be at the top of his form.