We (hubby and I) watched the samurai movie "The Hidden Blade", directed by Yamada Yoji last night, and were discussing why we enjoyed it so much and found Tarantino's "Kill Bill Vol 1" (which we saw for the first time the week before), also featuring samurai swords and dismemberment, so repellent and unengaging. We are both big fans of Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" and "Reservoir Dogs" and I remember liking, in a quiet low key sort of way, his "Jackie Brown" too.
"The Hidden Blade" came out in 2004, and "Kill Bill Vol 1" in 2003, so I don't think there are any conscious influences going either way for those specific films. Yamada is famous in Japan for his series of big hit films "Otoko wa Tsurai Yo" (It's tough being a man") also known as the "Tora san" (the name of the central character) movies and more recently was the writer for the "Tsuri Baka Nisshi" series (diary of a fishing fool). Neither of these series are what you might call samurai slasher epics, and are seen more in Japan as comforting family viewing, full of nostalgia and sentimentality.
It seems that Yamada, now in his 70s, is becoming more highbrow and serious in his final years, and "The Hidden Blade" is the middle film of three period samurai dramas he has done, which have been entered for Golden Bears and Oscars accordingly. Certainly "The Hidden Blade" seemed to me to be making some observations about foreign influence and Japanese values, being set in the 1860s, when Japan was being forcefully opened up by Western powers, in the years preceding the Meiji Restoration.
There is a moment, after the hero has tried to kill his friend (on orders from their clan) honourably in a sword fight, and the friend is in fact finished off by bullets from the militiamen, when the head of the militiamen says "we never tried our guns on humans before, so it was an excellent opportunity to observe their effect". It immediately had echoes for me of the kind of remarks made by the Allied powers before and after dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Maybe I am reading too much into it, but I felt Yamada was asking what kind of traditional Japanese values should be preserved and which are best jettisoned in the modern global age. Our hero, a low caste samurai, is "honourable" (respects women, modest, dislikes violence, is loyal but also vengeful) but this ultimately means he renounces his samurai status, marries a servant girl and goes to work in "trade" (which is the lowest status class in feudal Japan). This seems to be Yamada's preferred solution, contrasted with old, corrupt, venal and violent Japanese values but also with wholesale adoption of Western values.
And so to "Kill Bill", which is trying to say, what, exactly, about anything? It is repellent because it isn't I suppose. A New Yorker review puts it well:
"his use of styles and references feels increasingly arbitrary and eccentric, the scenes joined together by associations and loyalties that can’t possibly mean as much to anyone else as they mean to him [...]
Tarantino’s ambition, however, is unmistakable: he wants to impress his obsessions on the succeeding generations. The pop encyclopedist and video-store genius has become a megalomaniac, and the exhilarating filmmaker he might have been is disappearing fast."
So why am I connecting the two films? Well, there is one similar scene. In "Kill Bill Vol 1", The Bride goes to her old sword master to get a new sword, and is explicit with him that it will be used to "kill Bill", who was also a pupil of the sword master. In "The Hidden Blade", the hero visits his old sword master in order to be taught a new move, and again is explicit that he will use it to kill his friend, a former pupil of the sword master. In both cases the sword master has retired, in Kill Bill to become a sushi chef, in The Hidden Blade to become a farmer.
The resulting fights are prolonged, stylish and sadistic in "Kill Bill" and short, muddy and messy in "The Hidden Blade". In the latter, the friend, just before dying, points out that this new move the hero has learned is in fact cowardly, as it relies on feigning a turned back, and is not honourable at all. "The Hidden Blade" is "The Unforgiven" of Samurai movies. Which makes "Kill Bill" - "Blazing Saddles"? Although I am not sure it is that good.
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