Zatôichi

Directed by Takeshi Kitano

Written by Takeshi Kitano (screenplay) and Kan Shimozawa (novels)

Rated R for violence

116 minutes run time

USA Release July 2004

Most viewers of Takeshi Kitano’s “Zatôichi” would probably stop a little short of calling the movie tongue-in-cheek.  Nonetheless, that may be its most endearing quality.  The undercurrent of self-mockery helps the more sensitive viewers get over the apparently serious attempts to make blood spurt and fly in realistic fashions.  But the flying blood in “Zatôichi” only seems to heighten the sense of the ridiculous in the machismo of the semi- legitimate brand of samurai that makes up the average samurai movie.  .

Takeshi goes by the stage name of “Beat” Takeshi taken from his original stand-up comedy act, “The Beat Brothers” that was a smash hit in Japan in the late 1970s.  Beginning with his directorial debut in 1989, his work centered on the yakuza gangster genre.  When he barely survived a serious automobile crash in 1994 his style changed considerably with a greatly strengthened artistic sensibility and he went on to international acclaim, garnering awards such as Venice's Golden Lion.  He currently appears regularly on Japanese TV and is an active writer and painter.

Takeshi brings his blind masseuse character to the silver screen in this samurai version of Clint Eastwood’s “A Fistful of Dollars.”  In retrospect one has to laugh at least a little at the exaggerated machismo of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns.  The good and the bad are so shamelessly exaggerated that the audience is virtually pummeled about the head and shoulders with the struggle.  The good shoot so straight and fast that we hardly see the act itself, just the results.  The bad die with such looks of hopeless despair that we know they are glad to be gone.

There is an abundance of that in Zatôichi.  The bad are very bad.  They are like the bad in Leone’s Aqua Caliente.  They lean against decrepit buildings with their hands on their swords.  Their eyes are crooked.  They are fat.  They drool.  And they travel in packs, like wolves, unable to live on their own.  Like self-indulgent children who never moved out of the parents’ house, they rely on numbers to accost and humiliate innocent wanderers just as Zatôichi, the blind masseuse with the cane that kills.

In one of the first scenes of the movie, when a drooling pack of villains approaches the blind man, looking for an easy kill, the audience knows they are about to get their comeuppance.  What the audience doesn’t expect is the pratfall of the leader pulling his sword and accidentally cutting the shoulder of the henchman to his side.  This is the sort of physical throw-away humor that makes this movie worth seeing.  The actual swordfights are just the background for the dry three-stooge trickery of the combatants.  The cut henchman gives the gang leader a look of wounded surprise that brings the audience in on the joke.  Like the outtakes at the end of the movie that show the real personalities of the actors, “Zatôichi” shares the jokes with the audience while they are being enacted on the screen.

After this scene follows the introduction of the two rivals gangs that have turned the small town upside-down with their brutal exploitation.  Life is getting tough for the normal folks who only want to make a decent living; but the rival gangs seem intent on killing each other and everyone else in sight in their quest for dominance and power.  Zatôichi plays each off against the other, but not without some surprise allies in the form of the geisha sisters, O-Sei and O-Kinu, one of which has a secret all her own.  The two barely escaped a night of horror in which one of the gangs killed their family while robbing the household of chests of gold.

Michiyo Ookusu plays Aunt O-Ume who befriends Zatôichi and takes him into her household.  There is chemistry between the two, although never consummated.  She takes him in and accepts his offer of a massage, “But don’t get any ideas,” she admonishes.  “I haven’t any…,” she completes the phrase.  Her expression and tone say otherwise, but that pot is left to simmer.  Takeshi doesn’t make it easy for us.

Gadarukanaru Taka plays Aunt O-Ume’s feckless nephew who always seems to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  In an excellent comedic performance he adds as much spark to the movie as any three of the rest of the cast combined, except for perhaps the farmer boy next door who runs through the scenes with a spear yelling incoherently.  His yelling is an echo of the unstated message of the movie: “This samurai movie stuff is so many bison droppings, but it pays the bills….”

In spite of Takeshi’s previous fame of the comedic stage, he doesn’t say a word in this movie until the very end, when he further taunts the audience by opening his eyes and speaking briefly to insinuate that he might not be either mute or blind, after all.  A remarkable ending that brings the audience back out of the story and into the real world of Beat Takeshi.

A samurai flick for those who hate samurai flicks, Tarantino should study this work before he does his next dueling sword extravaganza.  There is more to the modern samurai flick than blood and steel.