Review: Hara-kiri - Death of a Samurai (2011)
Cast: Kôji Yakusho, Naoto Takenaka, Eita
Director: Takashi Miike
Country: Japan | UK
Genre: Drama
Official Trailer: Here
Editors Notes: Hara-kiri: Death of a Samurai opens in North American limited release Friday July 20th.
Miike Takashi’s 3D remake of Kobayashi Masaki’s stunning 1962 film Seppuku is one whose reason for being is a mystery, if not to prove Miike’s deftness at directing a sombre epic drama or to perhaps relate this melancholy tale of abusive power, casteism, poverty, and human value to today’s pessimistic climate of hardships and struggles.
With Hara-kiri, Miike does prove that he is a versatile and effective filmmaker who is as comfortable and assured with “extreme” genres such as horror and gangster as with dramas and historical films.
With Hara-kiri, Miike does prove that he is a versatile and effective filmmaker who is as comfortable and assured with “extreme” genres such as horror and gangster as with dramas and historical films. The film’s main cast also proves their acting muscles here. Ichikawa Ebizo XI, whose name betrays his famous kabuki acting family lineage, is self-contained fury personified in playing the master-less samurai Tsugomo Hanshiro seeking revenge at the House of Ii; Tsugomo’s frail daughter Miho is played softly by Matsushima Hikari; Eita convincingly inhabits the character of Tsugomo’s adopted ward Motome, whose well-intentioned gesture of requesting to commit ritual suicide with the hopes of employment or a monetary handout at the House of Ii marks the pivotal point in the lives of everyone and in the film; and Yakusho Koji as the House of Ii’s senior retainer is steely hypocrisy itself. Yet they do not, cannot, transcend the confines of the remake in a way similar to the way Miike and his cast do so in his 2010 remake of Kudo Eiichi’s 13 Assassins (1963) of the same title. In fact, like a dancer who has perfected his/her technique but cannot connect emotionally with an audience, Hara-kiri rings rather hollow, in any dimension.
Yes, Hara-kiri is a well-executed production at the level of direction, performance, and art design, all of which reference Kobayashi’s intense attention to stylisation to narrate an ironically otherwise gritty story. But because Kobayashi’s film has such a precise, even metronomic, stylised and stubborn pace in terms of physical movement, camera movement, delivery of dialogue, and narrative unfolding, very much like a duel or dance set in slow motion, Hara-kiri walks into an ambush of vulnerability in its interpretation of it. Nothing gets in the way of exposing the film’s attempt to mirror the film and get tangled (instead of overcoming) the double-edged sword-world of remakes, especially since it is in 3D: it is either not good enough to compare with the original or it copies the original too well to be considered a stand-alone work.
Hara-kiri is a well-executed production at the level of direction, performance, and art design, all of which reference Kobayashi’s intense attention to stylisation to narrate an ironically otherwise gritty story.
Miike may have been very conscious of this problem of exposed seams since he employs falling snow and a gossamer-soft mosquito net in Miho and Motome’s house in the second half of the film to put something between the camera and what it is filming, to disrupt the startling nakedness of the image found in Kobayashi’s film, and/or to inject his own brand of stylisation. But apart from sequences with snow falling and the mosquito net—visual and narrative elements that, like the use colour, try to rival the original’s ascetic aridity, filmed in gorgeous black-and-blinding-white cinematography—3D does not enhance the film’s impact. In fact, it distracts one from it. In truth, the film’s overall impact is a laboured, ponderous one, going through the motions well enough but without the bite of the original—it bears noting that part of the force of Kobayashi’s 1962 film is the savage dismantling of samurai ideology (honour, loyalty, appearance) specifically in the profoundly complex and turbulent context of postwar Japan.
Significantly, Kobayashi’s film and Miike’s film both travelled to the Cannes Film Festival. The first one secured the Special Jury Prize in 1963, while the second one became the first film in 3D to premiere in competition at the festival in 2011. The emotional, visceral differences between these two films perhaps could not be summed up more succinctly thus. As impressive as it is to look at and though admittedly not as negatively hollow as the samurai deity displayed in the House of Ii and whose ideology is severely undermined, Hara-kiri is unfortunately on the whole tedious and unmemorable.
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