Just bought tickets! I’m happy to be taking a short break from film pop and revisiting Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri, which is one of the features for The Long View: A Celebration of Widescreen at Berkeley’s PFA. Info here:
The Long View: A Celebration of Widescreen
Friday, August 15, 2008
8:55 p.m.
Harakiri
Masaki Kobayashi (Japan, 1962)
(Seppuku). Masaki Kobayashi harnesses the breathtaking beauty of black-and-white, widescreen cinematography to create an abstract epic that, in its mastery of movement through architectural space, has as great an affinity with the films of French director Alain Resnais and the Canadian Michael Snow as with the Japanese period spectacle. Starring Tatsuya Nakadai, the film depicts one man’s desperate attempt to crack the blind, absolute authority that characterizes the feudal age and, Kobayashi suggests, our own. In an Edo-period mansion, the camera inches down hallways and finds rooms within rooms to explicate a complex flashback narration; when the film bursts suddenly into action, all of these walls, entrances, and no-exits come brilliantly into play once again. In the bloody climax, the black-robed figures who were caught and dissected by a stationary camera throughout the film come into their own as an inexorable prophecy, like Toru Takemitsu’s haunting music and the words that emerge almost rhythmically from the dialogue: harakiri . . . (seppuku) . . .
—Judy Bloch
Written by Shinobu Hashimoto, based on the novel by Yasuhiko Takiguchi. Photographed by Yoshio Miyajima. With Tatsuya Nakadai, Rentaro Mikuni, Shima Iwashita, Akira Ishihama. (135 mins, In Japanese with English subtitles, Color, ’Scope, 35mm, From Janus/Criterion Collection)
* * *
This is simply one of my most favorite Tatsuya Nakadai roles ever (yes, even over Lord Hidetori in Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, which really was written not for him, but for Toshirô Mifune).
The effectiveness of this film is so reliant upon Nakadai’s being able to sit in one place, the central courtyard in seppuku position (as above), for the duration of the film, and talk story convincingly. An almost threadbare, timeworn ronin, he heartbreakingly relives his familial losses, he practices his cunning and deception to challenge and upend the arcane and corrupt feudal system against which he rebels, then proceeds to whup some serious samurai ass as a one-man wrecking machine (cue the Guster song here) using this enclosed space to his strategic benefit.
So it’s all animated facial expression (and pokerface), subtleties of voice, tone and tempo, and then of course with the whup ass against an entire estate of samurai, it’s the confidence and control of his body language which speaks to his character’s decades of experience over these young, courtly samurai (i.e. samurai by descendancy and not tested in real battle as an O.G. like himself would be). Yay! Such fun!
Tags: Harakiri, Masaki Kobayashi, Tatsuya Nakadai
