Japan Cuts Review: The Samurai That Night (2012)

July 21, 2013 Japan Cuts 2013, Reviews No Comments

The-Samurai-that-night

Cast:  , ,
Director: Masaaki Akahori
Country: Japan
Genre: Drama
Official Site: Here

Editor’s Notes: The following review is part of our coverage for JAPAN CUTS: The New York Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema which runs from July 11-21. For more information of this film series visit www.japansociety.org and follow Japan Society Film on Twitter at @js_film_nyc.

A hit-and-run connects a group of men in the aftermath of a woman’s death. Kijima (Yamada Takayuki), the driver and perpetrator of the accident, is imprisoned and released five years later; Nakamura (Sakai Masato), lives life as if dead to the world as a way to handle his grief over the death of his wife; Aoki (Arai Hirofumi), Nakamura’s brother-in-law, tries to get Nakamura to come out of his melancholia by arranging a blind date; and Kobayashi (Ayano Go), Kijima’s reluctant accomplice in the hit-and-run and subsequent flatmate when Kijima imposes himself after his release. Following an ellipsis that marks the five years that separate the hit-and-run and Kijima’s release from prison, the film begins to weave the connections between these four men, ultimately to arrive at the long-awaited, long-gestating nocturnal face-to-face encounter between Nakamura and Kijima to which the title refers. Initially meandering at first, but becoming ever more compelling and absorbing as the individual trajectories of each man emerges and develops, the debut feature of film and television actor Akahori Masaaki (adapted from his own stage play) is very promising and a well-acted effort on the idea of revenge, mourning, and social relations.

Initially meandering at first, but becoming ever more compelling and absorbing as the individual trajectories of each man emerges and develops…

While Nakamura’s wife’s death triggers the connection between the above-mentioned characters, Kijima sustains this connection five years following the accident. Seemingly born a bad seed, Kijima—as Nakamura points out to him in their meeting towards the end—does whatever he wants. He exists and comports himself outside of any social and moral framework, or better yet, in complete rejection of any. With his magnetic, aggressive personality captured finely by Yamada, Nakamura reenters society only to abuse those who crosses or sabotages his path, including Kobayashi. Inexplicably, Kobayashi stubbornly and fearfully sticks with Kijima to the point of having him live with him and his girlfriend and thus remains an accomplice to all of Kijima’s violent acts. Kijima also brings into his web a man who apparently had revealed his past to others and so tortures him and nearly sets him on fire.

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The men’s connection to one another begins in the form of death threats sent to Kijima by, presumably, Nakamura, especially since Nakamura is sometimes shown trailing Kijima during his various excursions outside Kobayashi’s apartment. As Nakamura’s brother-in-law Aoki gets in touch with Kijima, the latter bribes the former about the death threats. As such, Kijima is the fulcrum of power, menace, and misery in this corner of the world. In this way, the character Kijima is not unlike the male characters in Kim Ki-duk’s films: animalistic, brute force, and favouring the physical over the verbal.

Through a series of meetings of different combinations of the four men, sometimes including one or two others that Kijima has sucked into his world through threats of violence, the reverberation of Nakamura’s wife’s death deepens, above all with Nakamura himself. Despite owning his own ironworks, he goes about his job and among his employees in a daze, hardly interacts with other people voluntarily, and listens repeatedly and heartbreakingly to the voice message that his wife had left him on the day of her death. As Nakamura, Sakai transforms his ordinary face—made even more ordinary by Akahori by having him wear a pair of specs—into one of quiet and confused desperation. Nakamura is the obvious foil to Kijima: cerebral, fragile, and favouring the verbal over the physical even when he flirts with death as he does by taunting Kijima with letters of killing him and then killing himself.

Akahori is not necessarily interested in examining the workings, the whys and the hows, of either man. In fact, everyone is rather alienating because intentions are left muddled and unsaid…

It is a dark, introspective world that Akahori fashions—set during the onset of the typhoon season so that rain threatens the latter half of the film’s scenes—framed by Kijima’s amoral violence and Nakamura’s self-effacing grief. The film’s darkness and introspection culminate in these two men’s meeting in the rain, where the verbal and the physical run into each other.

But Akahori is not necessarily interested in examining the workings, the whys and the hows, of either man. In fact, everyone is rather alienating because intentions are left muddled and unsaid, especially Kijima and Nakamura. Yet bursts of emotion here and there pierce the spectator and provide a glimpse of the emotional and physical turmoil being wrought among these characters. For instance, Nakamura’s employee suddenly bursts into tears (the reason for which he cannot explain) on a bench following an improvised exercise of catch between Nakamura and the blind date that Aoki had arranged previously; catch being an activity that Nakamura and his wife used to do. Another example is Nakamura himself bursting into tears in the background as the woman with whom he engages in a hotel sings karaoke in the foreground.

Admittedly, The Samurai That Night may be challenging to latch on to emotionally in the beginning. It is a slow-burning fuse of a film that takes its time to build up the tangibility of its characters and their relationships, especially ones so delicate because they are constructed on grief, regret, and violence.

79/100 ~ GOOD. Admittedly, The Samurai That Night may be challenging to latch on to emotionally in the beginning. It is a slow-burning fuse of a film that takes its time to build up the tangibility of its characters and their relationships, especially ones so delicate because they are constructed on grief, regret, and violence.

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