Another Kurosawa, another huge disappointment. The man is quickly becoming for me one of the most overrated filmmakers in history. I haven’t seen all of his stuff so maybe I’m jumping to conclusions, but I’ve covered his major work and the only one that can count as a legitimate masterpiece is Throne of Blood. I could make this post an omnibus gripe session but let me get to the film in question here.
Kagemusha is simply bad. Let’s stop cutting it so much slack as the “warm-up” for Ran (which is no excuse, especially when Ran itself isn’t that good) and for Chrissakes let’s not toss “masterpiece” anywhere near it. Aside from the incredible opening scene, where the Lord and his double (both played by the extraordinary Tatsuya Nakadai) are both in the same tense, stationary shot, the film lacks any sense of drama, consequence, excitement, characterization, thematic heft, or even basic storytelling flow. Granted, thanks mostly to Nakadai, the character of the Double is able to generate some sympathy toward the end but by then there’s only one reel left, which is devoted to cinema’s least engaging and most non-sensical battle sequence. Wait, I take that back—the earlier nighttime battle sequence is even less engaging and makes even less sense.
To be frank, I have to assume that the reason this film is as well regarded as it is is because Kurosawa came up with the admittedly brilliant idea of sticking a colored flag on the backs of all his extras. This makes even the endlessly repeated shot of a horseman (or horsemen) galloping across the screen look like a visual wonder. There are times in the film, as in Ran, where it seems that the sole purpose of the picture is to photograph thousands of color-coded extras march across the screen. The majesty of these images is not lost on me, and there is one shot in particular of soldiers backlit by the sun, which looks like at least three different composite images layered on top of each other, that is truly breathtaking. But lots of extras and colored banners does not a masterpiece make. There needs to be a reason for all the pomp and circumstance. Here, there is none. After a plodding hour-long expository setup, battle finally erupts, but without any context. It just happens. And it makes no sense. As in Ran, Kurosawa’s idea of medieval warfare is a bunch of guys shooting at an endless stream of other guys either running or riding parallel to the shooters—that’s right, parallel. I’m no military expert, but shouldn’t an attacking army be either going toward (perpendicular) to the enemy line or, if they retreat, away from the line? But parallel to? The way Kurosawa films the action, they are like ducks in a shooting gallery. This makes for a pretty picture, what with all those banners and backlighting, but is entirely nonsensical. Worse, though, is the complete anonymity of the action—there is no build up of tension, no excitement in the action, just bodies in motion. If you took a still frame from one of these sequences and hung it up on a wall somewhere, I’d say great photo. Watching it as part of a narrative film, I say bad filmmaking.
But this instance isn’t even as bad as it gets. The previously mentioned nighttime battle sequence is a master class in boring and confusing the audience. First of all, this sequence is some of the worst night(or day-for-night, I couldn’t quite tell) cinematography ever. Even in a brand new print, the image was muddy and egregiously dark, to the point of barely being able to make out figures on screen (those colored flags finally came in handy). Again, instead of any real action, all we get is off-screen commands to troops, who then shuffle across the sand dunes to make new formations, another excuse for Kurosawa to use all those flags and extras. There is no drama, no narrative rhythm, just constant, vaguely defined motion. Throughout this sequence, I had no idea where troops were in relation to each other, what was going on in the larger battle, why the attacking general halted his troops even though he greatly outnumbered the enemy ahead of him, or, most importantly, why I should care. The purpose of this scene is to show the Double’s reaction to all the killing around him, but when the audience has no idea what’s happening, the effect is lost. It just becomes the usual “war is bad” mantra that every war movie needs to make clear, even while they trumpet its glories and revel in its aesthetic pleasure. This paradox is all the more apparent in Kurosawa’s films, where the pictoral choreography of men in action is paramount.
The final, (anti)climactic battle sequence wasn’t quite as disappointing as the one in Ran, where, after a massive build-up of people and anticipation, the battle devolves into a repeated shot of a couple extras falling off their horses, but it came pretty close. My complaint here isn’t that Kurosawa skimps on the money shot of troops actually engaging in combat (which he does, choosing instead to cut to reaction shots of the non-combatants), but that the setup for the sequence, again, doesn’t make sense. Like the other battle sequences, this one simply occurs. There is no reason aside from the fact that the new Lord is a little trigger-happy. The generals of the once invincible Takeda Clan all resign themselves to defeat even before the battle starts, simply because the new Lord has disobeyed the late Lord’s wishes to not attack outside of their own lands. The opposing warlords give the order to “shoot the horses first” as if this were a novel idea. Sure enough, as the Takeda generals send one army after another at the enemy lines, they are mowed down by a wall of gunfire. Throughout all of this, all I could think of was why didn’t the Takeda Clan just send all their guys out at once, instead of waiting for each separate army to be destroyed and then sending in another? Or better question, if this is the way they fought, how did they become Japan’s most powerful clan in the first place? Why didn’t their enemies just shoot them down like they did here? None of this matters, though, as long as all those extras with all those flags on their backs get to create the color choreography that’s really on Kurosawa’s mind. Action here is empty spectacle, far prettier but also far more boring and ill conceived than your average Braveheart knock-off. There is no lyricism to the succession of images, which is what makes Ran worth watching, but rather a forced poetry that comes off exactly as such.
Lest you think I’m some sort of action-whore who believes The Last Samurai is the best movie ever, let me be clear that I don’t necessarily want or need Hollywood-ized gratuitous combat viscera to get my jollies. I do expect to be excited and engaged, though, either by the sheer physicality or by the ideas presented in an epic such as this, and that’s where Kagemusha truly fails. The film thinks of itself as grand tragedy, but it left me feeling nothing. I never felt that the narrative provided any meaningful stakes, that there was a reason for me to feel either way about any of the characters or about the Takeda Clan. As I said before, Nakadai’s portrayal of the Double is sympathetic, and the relationship he has with the true Lord’s grandson is touching, but it is not enough in a nearly three-hour pageant of anonymous horses and men. There are no real characters in the film, aside from the Double, in that none of the other figures on screen register as people. A muddled theme of suppressing ones true identity to the greater good is lazily thrown into the film, registering zero resonance. It looked pretty easy/fun to impersonate a rich and respected warlord.
Look, there’s good stuff in this film as there is in all of Kurosawa’s films, but for the life of me I cannot understand why these are so well-regarded. I’ll keep watching Kurosawa, but from now on consider my expectations officially lowered.
by Timothy Sun | Source: 35mm
07 Jul 2008 4:26 PM | Comments (6)
I came, at some length, to a similar opinion of the film here, but actually more for what I saw as its lack of coherence with Kurosawa’s earlier work. Setting this grave, Lucas-Coppola teleplay aside (along with the vivid, but numbingly boring Dreams, and Ran, which I agree is overrated), one is hard-pressed to find a decade-plus period in any director’s career that is as consistent and rewarding as Kurosawa’s 1950’s. Not all of these are masterpieces, but many are, including High and Low, Throne of Blood, and Stray Dog (not to mention the two really obvious ones). The only other directors I can think of who come even close are Bergman and (by a hair) Ozu.
Just to clarify that last statement: Bergman actually blows Kurosawa out of the water on that count, but that might just be a biased opinion on my part, considering that I am one of Ingmar’s love-children.
Just read your essay on the film, Leo, and I have to disagree with your conclusion that the “sense of hopeless fixity renders unconvincing any hope for human agency.” None of the actions taken in the film are predetermined or circumscribed by non-human actors—the thief chooses to become the double and is even told at one point to do “whatever your heart pleases” because the true Lord was direct like that. The Lord’s son chooses to go to war for no reason, the thief chooses to foolishly ride the horse that gives him away, etc. The faceless, anonymous slaughter can, I guess be said to point toward a sort of anti-humanist, all-is-lost philosophy but at one point the thief, as the Lord, orders his troops to not go after the retreating enemy, thereby avoiding more violence. So human agency is abound and quite potent, just perhaps foolish.
As to Kurosawa’s two really obvious masterpieces from the fifties, I don’t see either as being a true masterpiece, though Rashomon comes closest (if it weren’t for that stupid baby).
It’s admittedly been a while since I saw this last (and will be a long time until I see it again), but your examples strike me as the kinds of things that might be determined by “Fate” in such a film. Of course, in bad tragedy as in bad farce, we simply perceive such occurrences as the results of bad judgment or bad luck (or, at best, the perverse whim of the director). But I think that Kurosawa at least would claim these as invocations of the hand of Fate, typical of the tragic mode, only without the slightest breath of pathos or humanism evident in his earlier work. This humanism in the earlier films does yield the occasional maudlin scene, like that of the baby in Rashomon (which, stupid as it may be, I still find affecting). But more often than not, it seems to me that Kurosawa’s very obvious abilities as a blocker of scenes and a scenarist, his oddly schematic structures, and his incredibly dynamic use of the telephoto lens balance this tendency well in these earlier films. His later films simply lack these rigorous and dynamic qualities, as well as the humanism (or occasionally sentimentality) that softens them.
Just out of curiosity, what are Kurosawa’s two “really obvious” fifties masterpieces? Are you referring to SEVEN SAMURAI and IKIRU, SEVEN SAMURAI and RASHOMON, or RASHOMON and IKIRU? ‚Ķor are you counting YOJIMBO since, although it’s from 1961, it precedes HIGH AND LOW (1963)?
You know, I thought I’d actually already mentioned Ikiru in there, so I was referring to Seven Samurai and Rashomon. I think these are probably the two most obvious major films of his career and certainly of this period (while Ikiru is close, it seems to wax and wane a bit in stature).
Of course, I’m being a bit liberal with what I term Kurosawa’s “fifties”—Stray Dog is ‘49.
leo
7 July 2008
2:07 PM
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