302 Harakiri

[Mr Sausage]

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[denti alligator]

This is one of the few samurai films I love. And I think that’s primarily because it is such a scathing critique of samurai culture (and, by extension, the cinematic genre about this culture) and its—dare I say it?—toxic masculinity. But it’s a critique that still firmly clings to a purified notion of samurai honor. Maybe what the film doesn’t do so well is to reflect on that tension. It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but perhaps others who also know the sub-genre better can comment on how it mobilizes and/or subverts the conventions.

[domino harvey]

I think it functions on a more basic level as a superior, slow-burning revenge film where we only gradually realize what’s going on and what previously transpired. In this way it also reminds me a great deal of the slow meting out of recontextualizing information in traditional stage play narratives.

Also, shout out to the member years ago who sold me a lot of Blu-rays including the MoC of this, as I never would have sought it out on my own and it really is an effective film

[therewillbeblus]

Part of what makes this such a great film is that it seamlessly blends potent melodrama into a revenge tale, having its cake and eating it too as a mystery-thriller and social problem drama informing one another kinetically. We're invited to invest in the revenge in a circumferential manner, rather than directly with superficial tit for tat rigid codes, and so it's far more satisfying but also much more tragic in the end. The tragedy is bled dry from direct painful flashbacks and an understanding that no shame or pain can undo the harm perpetrated, and the satisfaction is gleaned from the feeling that we (and our lead) have 'earned' a moment to render the opponents impotent by the detailing of his own powerlessness to overcome suffering throughout. Instead of impulsively reverting to the codes of saving face or revenge ore samurai practices, they're deconstructed here and left as a last resort, but also more in line with the existential unidimensional last-act goal of noir protagonists. It's an admittedly regressive action on the part of Tatsuya Nakadai, but one that is validated by his history and the codes, repurposed here with an acknowledgement of their limitations to yield the most meaningful catharsis.

In a sense, it's several kinds of Japanese films meshed together, engaging with each other to enlighten how a singular one's function is missing a piece independently, but also how all kinds are futile at achieving any kind of 'completeness' either. Simply posing an agonizing melodrama may ignore the natural urge to react with aggression and vengeance, to empower within constraints; but simply posing the revenge would ignore the depths of emotional vulnerabilities underneath the iceberg, often denied meditation on in favor of actionable offensive behavior, serving as defense mechanisms protecting the psyche from stewing in frail paralysis.

[MichaelB]

I haven't watched this in a decade, but last time I did (on the occasion of the near-simultaneous release of the Criterion and Eureka BDs), I published this in Sight & Sound:

Kobayashi Masaki’s first samurai film is one of the genre’s major masterpieces, not least for its exploration and criticism of the ritual façades governing the samurai code of honour – if notions of ‘honour’ can legitimately be applied to what is forensically exposed as a viciously hypocritical system that renders men penniless and children fatherless thanks to an unbending refusal to take context and individual circumstance into account.

It’s set in 1630, a time of peace that proves paradoxically disastrous for the samurai that contributed to the Tokugawa shogunate’s victory during prolonged civil conflict. Deprived of their very raison d’être, many former samurai have been forced to become wandering ronin, explicitly forbidden from taking on any other kind of employment (one is seen fruitlessly queuing for a labouring job) and treated with widespread mistrust. Desperate to stave off starvation, they devise a scam that involves presenting themselves at the gates of the fortresses of the few extant clans, demanding their right as samurai to commit harakiri (or, more accurately, seppuku, the film’s Japanese title) with all the attendant pomp and ceremony.

In most cases, the supplicants are contemptuously paid off (which of course was their intended outcome), but on one occasion the Iyi clan’s senior counsellor Saito Kageyu (Mikuni Rentaro) decides to assert his authority in his leader’s absence by insisting that Chijiiwa Motome (Ishihama Akira) goes through with the ceremony, even when it becomes clear that not only does Chijiiwa not want to do it, but he even lacks the necessary equipment, having sold his two samurai swords some time earlier and replaced them with bamboo facsimiles. Unmoved, Saito insists that he use them instead.

This early scene and its barely watchable conclusion presents Kobayashi’s anti-feudal argument in kernel form, but the bulk of the surrounding narrative remains to be fleshed out by the older samurai Tsugumo Hanshiro (Nakadai Tatsuya). Saito initially assumes that he intends to pull off the same trick as Chijiiwa, but as Tsugumo gradually reveals his motives in lacerating detail, it becomes clear that he has a very different outcome in mind. A few drops of agreeably dark comedy (three supposedly fearless warriors all pull unexpected sickies for the same reason) leaven an inexorable accretion of human tragedy that turns positively Shakespearean well before the end.

Kobayashi’s control of this material is masterly throughout. Most of cinematographer Miyajima Yoshio’s widescreen compositions are, like Nakadai’s unnervingly calm basso delivery, deceptively measured and tranquil, the camera gliding serenely through the Iyi clan’s various rooms before coming to rest in the courtyard where much of the drama takes place. The ritualistic staging is deliberately contrasted with the horrors unveiled in flashback by Tsugumo’s deceptively calm narrative: after so much tension, the climactic swordfights come as cathartic relief. The film’s production coincided with a revival of interest in traditional Japanese musical instruments that had fallen out of favour after the war, and Takemitsu Toru’s score is quite unlike that of Hayazaki Fumio’s more Westernised accompaniments to earlier samurai films by Kurosawa and Mizoguchi. He makes particularly eloquent use of the biwa, or Japanese lute, whether plucked to emphasise individual gestures or strummed continuously as a background to a more elaborate set-piece.