Unforgiven/ Yurusarezaru Mono (15.)
Directed by Sang-il Lee.
Starring Ken Watanabe, Koichi Sato, Akira Emoto, Yuya Yagira, Jun Kunimura and Shiori Kusuna. In Japanese with subtitles. 135 mins
This is a Japanese version of Clint Eastwood's final Western that has been made with care, skill and craftsmanship – and that is probably all you reall yneed to know about it. It is a meticulous piece of work. Right from the start it has the reassuring heft of quality to it, you know that this will be meaty and substantial. I don't know what the Japanese equivalent of the Oscars is but no doubt this will clean up. If you want to quibble you could admit that the downside of all this weight and reverence is that the film is quite stately and perhaps a little slow.
It reverses the standard trajectory which was for samurai movies to be remade as westerns. Hollywood took what they needed from Japanese cinema, dumped the rest and made out like it had been their idea all along. Yurusarezaru mono slavishly follows Eastwood's original with a flunkey's devotion. It doesn't find fault or ask question of it, but just agrees with its every step and doesn't for a moment forget to express its gratitude to its inspiration. It isn't a scene for scene remake, but is close enough. It is set in the same era and finds parallels with the aftermath of the Civil War and the end of the shogun era when former samurais were hunted down. Sang-il Lee fills the screen with red sunsets and vast canyons and any angle on the Japanese landscape that can be made to look like the traditional wild west. Was life really so similar on either side of the Pacific Ocean a century and a half ago?
At times the resemblances are uncanny. At times you could swear that Akira Emoto actually sounds like Morgan Freeman. The actor in the English Bob role, played by Richard Harris in Unforgiven, looks a little like Noel Coward, which is odd but not inappropriate. Watanabe is strong as the lead, Jubei the killer, but he is an actor playing a role. Eastwood had an almost regal bearing in the original, like a long reining monarch renouncing his rule, and then reclaiming it at the end.
The beauty of David Webb People's original script was that although everybody got something, nobody got exactly what was coming to them. Unforgiven is often called anti-violence but it is more vengeance skeptic. The mechanics of retribution are set up but are then shown to be flawed. Hackman's sheriff Little Bob is certainly a dislikeable figure but is not unreasonable. When, on the point of death, he says that he doesn't deserve this audience tend to agree, even though they still want Eastwood to pull that trigger and fulfill the narrative arc we have bought into. Here though the lawman is entirely unsympathetic, and you are desperate for him to get his much deserved comeuppance. So here we have a film that slavishly copies the original, yet somehow misses the entire point.
Extras
The brothers Warner never send their home releases out in anything less than their Sunday best. This disc has-
- deleted scenes with or without commentary
- an hour long Making of documentary
- a ten minute piece called Challenge To the Masterpiece which sound like it might be an analysis of how the two films compare but is just cast and crew yakking on about how tough it was.
Directed by Sang-il Lee.
Starring Ken Watanabe, Koichi Sato, Akira Emoto, Yuya Yagira, Jun Kunimura and Shiori Kusuna. In Japanese with subtitles. 135 mins
This is a Japanese version of Clint Eastwood's final Western that has been made with care, skill and craftsmanship – and that is probably all you reall yneed to know about it. It is a meticulous piece of work. Right from the start it has the reassuring heft of quality to it, you know that this will be meaty and substantial. I don't know what the Japanese equivalent of the Oscars is but no doubt this will clean up. If you want to quibble you could admit that the downside of all this weight and reverence is that the film is quite stately and perhaps a little slow.
It reverses the standard trajectory which was for samurai movies to be remade as westerns. Hollywood took what they needed from Japanese cinema, dumped the rest and made out like it had been their idea all along. Yurusarezaru mono slavishly follows Eastwood's original with a flunkey's devotion. It doesn't find fault or ask question of it, but just agrees with its every step and doesn't for a moment forget to express its gratitude to its inspiration. It isn't a scene for scene remake, but is close enough. It is set in the same era and finds parallels with the aftermath of the Civil War and the end of the shogun era when former samurais were hunted down. Sang-il Lee fills the screen with red sunsets and vast canyons and any angle on the Japanese landscape that can be made to look like the traditional wild west. Was life really so similar on either side of the Pacific Ocean a century and a half ago?
At times the resemblances are uncanny. At times you could swear that Akira Emoto actually sounds like Morgan Freeman. The actor in the English Bob role, played by Richard Harris in Unforgiven, looks a little like Noel Coward, which is odd but not inappropriate. Watanabe is strong as the lead, Jubei the killer, but he is an actor playing a role. Eastwood had an almost regal bearing in the original, like a long reining monarch renouncing his rule, and then reclaiming it at the end.
The beauty of David Webb People's original script was that although everybody got something, nobody got exactly what was coming to them. Unforgiven is often called anti-violence but it is more vengeance skeptic. The mechanics of retribution are set up but are then shown to be flawed. Hackman's sheriff Little Bob is certainly a dislikeable figure but is not unreasonable. When, on the point of death, he says that he doesn't deserve this audience tend to agree, even though they still want Eastwood to pull that trigger and fulfill the narrative arc we have bought into. Here though the lawman is entirely unsympathetic, and you are desperate for him to get his much deserved comeuppance. So here we have a film that slavishly copies the original, yet somehow misses the entire point.
Extras
The brothers Warner never send their home releases out in anything less than their Sunday best. This disc has-
- deleted scenes with or without commentary
- an hour long Making of documentary
- a ten minute piece called Challenge To the Masterpiece which sound like it might be an analysis of how the two films compare but is just cast and crew yakking on about how tough it was.
