Kagemusha. (12.)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa. 1980
Starring Tatsuya Nakadai, Kenichi Hagiwara, Tsutomu Yamazaki, Jinpachi Nezu, Hideji Otaki and Daisuke Ryu. Out on Blu-ray and DVD from the Criterion Collection. 180 mins.
Back in 1980, Kagemusha was a very big deal. After a decade without making a film in Japan, this was 70-year old Kurosawa's big comeback: an ambitious historical epic about warring clans in the 16th century with Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas as executive producers. It was a big hit and won the Barn Door at Cannes. And yet now its place in film history is as the trial run for his next film Ran, the King Lear adaptation that would usurp this as his late-era masterpiece.
Is that an injustice? Seeing it again now I'd be inclined to say probably not. Ran is a sweeping epic full of horses, battles, castles and legions of soldiers toddling around with their plates of armour flapping about awkwardly. Kagemusha is a sweeping epic full of all the same things but without quite the same sweep.
In the decade before this Kurosawa had made only one film, the Russian language Dersu Uzala. Though that won the Oscar for best foreign-language film, his career was still considered to be in the doldrums and his bold plan to bounce back with this seemed destined to remain a pipedream until Coppola and Lucas stepped in. We credit the pair of them but it was really Lucas' doing, twisting 20th Century Fox's arm to stump up $1.5 million from their Star Wars profits to bridge the gap between what the Japanese studio could raise and what was needed to make the film.
The title translates as Shadow Warrior, referring to a thief (Nakadai) who has been saved from execution to be a double for the warlord Shingen (also Nakadai.) After Shingen is killed he has to take his place, though he's more puppet than shadow with the heads of the clan telling him what to do. The film opens with a long static dialogue scene (six minutes) between the Shingen, his brother (Yamazaki) and the lookalike, the relationship between the three signified by the slightly raised position of the Shingen over his brother and of the pair of them over the thief. Then we cut to a vivid sequence of a messenger running through a castle, dodging through the ranks of exhausted or injured soldiers. It's a great opening, restraint followed by release, but having successfully given the film the giddy-up, the film never quite gets into a gallop.
The Shingen house banner is divided into four elements: wind, fire, forest and mountain. As a viewer, you might consider the film to be too much the unmoveable mountain and not enough raging fire. It is divided up into horsey scenes, battle scenes and sitting/ talking scenes with an emphasis on the later. When it comes to the battles there's a lot of riding around and getting into position, but not much actual fighting. When you get climactic confrontations rendered almost entirely through shots of the leaders sat on horseback watching it all happen out of the picture you may feel a little bit cheated. (The disc includes a short feature on Lucas and Coppola's involvement and one of them mentions watching a day of Kurosawa filming an elaborate action sequence, only a few seconds of which appeared in the finished film.)
Other little nitpicks might be the rather conventional western sounding score (western as in geography, not genre), a lack of really compelling characters and the film not fully delineating the convoluted story and differentiating all the various locations and factions. A few nice maps to tell us which castle was which and where exactly we were would've been helpful on a practical level, as well as engaging the viewer more directly with the events. As it is they windbag on about strategy and battle plans and you begin to glaze over after a while.
Look, obviously Kagemusha is a very fine film by a very fine filmmaker whose only major flaw is not being quite as very fine a film as the one the very fine filmmaker made next. Ran made this one largely redundant. Which is tough on the old Shadow Warrior but means it served its purpose. It gave him the clout to make his long-cherished dream project. And if the 70-year-old's health had failed him before he got to make Ran (he was already losing his sight) we'd always have had this one to fall back on.
Supplements.
Restored high-definition digital transfer, with DTS-HD Master Audio 4.0 soundtrack on Blu-ray edition
Directed by Akira Kurosawa. 1980
Starring Tatsuya Nakadai, Kenichi Hagiwara, Tsutomu Yamazaki, Jinpachi Nezu, Hideji Otaki and Daisuke Ryu. Out on Blu-ray and DVD from the Criterion Collection. 180 mins.
Back in 1980, Kagemusha was a very big deal. After a decade without making a film in Japan, this was 70-year old Kurosawa's big comeback: an ambitious historical epic about warring clans in the 16th century with Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas as executive producers. It was a big hit and won the Barn Door at Cannes. And yet now its place in film history is as the trial run for his next film Ran, the King Lear adaptation that would usurp this as his late-era masterpiece.
Is that an injustice? Seeing it again now I'd be inclined to say probably not. Ran is a sweeping epic full of horses, battles, castles and legions of soldiers toddling around with their plates of armour flapping about awkwardly. Kagemusha is a sweeping epic full of all the same things but without quite the same sweep.
In the decade before this Kurosawa had made only one film, the Russian language Dersu Uzala. Though that won the Oscar for best foreign-language film, his career was still considered to be in the doldrums and his bold plan to bounce back with this seemed destined to remain a pipedream until Coppola and Lucas stepped in. We credit the pair of them but it was really Lucas' doing, twisting 20th Century Fox's arm to stump up $1.5 million from their Star Wars profits to bridge the gap between what the Japanese studio could raise and what was needed to make the film.
The title translates as Shadow Warrior, referring to a thief (Nakadai) who has been saved from execution to be a double for the warlord Shingen (also Nakadai.) After Shingen is killed he has to take his place, though he's more puppet than shadow with the heads of the clan telling him what to do. The film opens with a long static dialogue scene (six minutes) between the Shingen, his brother (Yamazaki) and the lookalike, the relationship between the three signified by the slightly raised position of the Shingen over his brother and of the pair of them over the thief. Then we cut to a vivid sequence of a messenger running through a castle, dodging through the ranks of exhausted or injured soldiers. It's a great opening, restraint followed by release, but having successfully given the film the giddy-up, the film never quite gets into a gallop.
The Shingen house banner is divided into four elements: wind, fire, forest and mountain. As a viewer, you might consider the film to be too much the unmoveable mountain and not enough raging fire. It is divided up into horsey scenes, battle scenes and sitting/ talking scenes with an emphasis on the later. When it comes to the battles there's a lot of riding around and getting into position, but not much actual fighting. When you get climactic confrontations rendered almost entirely through shots of the leaders sat on horseback watching it all happen out of the picture you may feel a little bit cheated. (The disc includes a short feature on Lucas and Coppola's involvement and one of them mentions watching a day of Kurosawa filming an elaborate action sequence, only a few seconds of which appeared in the finished film.)
Other little nitpicks might be the rather conventional western sounding score (western as in geography, not genre), a lack of really compelling characters and the film not fully delineating the convoluted story and differentiating all the various locations and factions. A few nice maps to tell us which castle was which and where exactly we were would've been helpful on a practical level, as well as engaging the viewer more directly with the events. As it is they windbag on about strategy and battle plans and you begin to glaze over after a while.
Look, obviously Kagemusha is a very fine film by a very fine filmmaker whose only major flaw is not being quite as very fine a film as the one the very fine filmmaker made next. Ran made this one largely redundant. Which is tough on the old Shadow Warrior but means it served its purpose. It gave him the clout to make his long-cherished dream project. And if the 70-year-old's health had failed him before he got to make Ran (he was already losing his sight) we'd always have had this one to fall back on.
Supplements.
Restored high-definition digital transfer, with DTS-HD Master Audio 4.0 soundtrack on Blu-ray edition
- Audio commentary by Kurosawa scholar Stephen Prince
- Lucas, Coppola, and Kurosawa, an interview piece from 2005 in which directors George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola discuss Kurosawa and Kagemusha
- Documentary from 2003 on the making of the film
- Image: Kurosawa’s Continuity, a piece from 1993 reconstructing Kagemusha through Kurosawa’s paintings and sketches
- Suntory Whisky commercials made on the set of Kagemusha
- Gallery of storyboards painted by Kurosawa and images of their realization on-screen
- Theatrical trailers and teasers
- Plus: An essay by scholar Peter Grilli (DVD and Blu-ray), and an interview with Kurosawa by renowned critic Tony Rayns (Blu-ray only)
- Cover painting by Akira Kurosawa
