2004's unprecedented festival foray into the world of bloody-edged combat saw the long-awaited arrival of one film in particular: Takeshi Kitano's samurai-revival Zatoichi. TIM WONG writes.


IN WHAT IS considered a first for the school of Takeshi Kitano, Zatoichi represents the long-overdue liberation of a directorial enigma whose facial twitch was the most sporadic thing about his films. Excluding the one-time idiocy of Getting Any?, Kitano's body of work consists mostly of a highly composed stasis interrupted periodically by an unannounced violence – the sort that would involve the self-extraction of intestines or the not-so-hygienic use of chopsticks. Post-Hana-bi, there was a little less of this; the playful, structure-less Kikujiro that subdued violence perfectly for more chunkier emotions to surface, or the annoyingly beautiful, generally unmarketable puppetry of Dolls. Zatoichi – that most staple of Japanese subgenres – might firmly declare the mainstreaming of Japan's most new-wavy export in its revived millennial form, but it's actually much less of a departure than it is the culmination of a 9-film style lingering on the cusp of redundancy.

Kitano hasn't yet reached the expiry date on the post-minimalist Yakuza movie, but the signs are that the whole Harry Callahan-slash-sensitive machismo schtick has exhausted itself. This is no more evident than in Brother (and the last of Kitano's NZIFF appearances), a wandering stopgap-of-a-movie dissecting the boy-meets-world road trip and Bunraku theatre motif: two films where he's at least trying to buck the trend. It's both a bloody gesture to the AFM and a literal manifestation of the East-meets-West dialectic, yet Brother also hints profusely – like a 10-year retrospective nutshell – at the unofficial retirement of that impassive, easily antagonised enforcer we've all come to strangely love. It's a "Last Harrah" of sorts, U-turning full circle towards Kitano's very first, Violent Cop, as if to complete the cycle and close a chapter on an honorary niche in film, one as indelibly Beat as it is Takeshi.

Japanese cinema's new contemporary, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, may have safely assumed the role of steely modernist that Kitano once owned, but "Beat" – the stage name adopted when lending his block-house figure to fleeting cameos and short-lived stabs at self-parody – has much left to offer, both as director and formidable screen presence. His latest – a superb samurai-chambara without a yellow tracksuit in sight – is neither a sell out or about-face, but an exhilarating pent-up release of all that guilt, listlessness and repressed emotional anxiety, worn firmly on the sleeve of every leading character since the good cop/bad cop, and almost always followed by the inevitable post-climactic suicide.


Release is the key word here; Zatoichi not so much the turning of a new leaf, but the natural overflow of an oeuvre personified by clean angles, vacant stares and laughter that came in only deadpan or pitch black. This and all of the above is subverted in the opening scene, where a gang of clumsy bandits take to the deceptively vulnerable Zatoichi – blind, bleached, but brutal when he wants to be – with little success, one eager challenger reaching for his imitation Hattori Hanzo with gusto, only to slash his adjacent comrade's arm in an overly-enthusiastic, wildly reckless unsheathing. It's a snap moment of comic relief that sets the tone for the rest of the film: controlled, efficient stylisation in that unbreakable Kitano mould, but one with a loosened grip not at all opposed to irreverence, humour or even a hint of postmodernity.

Kitano's films often begin with some form of physical provocation; Zatoichi no different except that it embraces this violence through the conventions of samurai cinema – all that shiny Japanese steel digitally amplified in flashes of chrome and cascades of red. Here, he revels in the genre and its quota of death; the drawing of swords, blood and limbs never articulated better; that clean, systematic elimination of the enemy – so indicative of the Japanese manner and aesthetic – a thing of furious precision, putting the gung-ho swashbuckling of The Last Samurai or the amped J-Pop excess of Azumi firmly to bed. Even the combo-homage of Kill Bill suffers under the weight of Kitano's dices; Uma's treatment of her custom-made blade not entirely the Way of the Samurai, but an incorrigible hybrid of deadly one-hit kills and show pony martial artistry – what you get when you cross Once Upon a Time in China with Shogun Assassin.

Kung Fu does not register in the vocab of the samurai, and Kitano knows it. Whereas Jet Li and Donnie Yen might exchange 100-or-more choreographed blows before delivering anything remotely fatal (see: Hero), Toshiro Mifune and Shintaro Katsu – the original and definitive blind masseur – would strike once and strike surely. It's a warrior's sensibility, one that taps directly into the mythology of the Western; where one shot means one kill, and where the art of drawing, shooting and reloading is executed in that most singular, graceful of synchronised motions. Mr. Eastwood was one such exponent, either with a six-shooter or a Magnum '45 in hand, and Kitano – dubbed occasionally the "Clint of the East" – brandishes his 2-in-1 samurai blade/walking cane with the same gall and explosive temperament. The true barometer of the genre, however, is in that uncanny crossover between samurai and cowboy, Eastern and Western, Seven Samurai and Magnificent Seven. If only Miramax would finance a blind cowboy movie directed by and starring Kevin Costner, would it then all really make sense.


Degrees of separation aside, Zatoichi is a staunchly loyal reintroduction to the wandering samurai genre and the blind masseur franchise – fundamentally defined by standard revenge plotting, clearly labelled protagonists/antagonists and ferocious bouts of slicing and dicing at regular movie-portioned intervals. Here, it's basically Yojimbo without the double-crossing; Zatoichi a drifter into another anonymous town with yet another gangland-vengeance feud to amend, only with less brain teasing and more cutting-to-the-chase. For the first time it even feels as if Kitano isn't trying to reinvent the genre (his Yakuza films, for example, totally invert those of Kinji Fukusaku's), preferring to embellish instead with a newfound freedom for movement, supplemented by that familiar sense of composition and space. Aesthetically, it's Kitano's most interesting film yet because he works within unfamiliar boundaries without the compulsion to turn them inside out. Yes, Zatoichi is that rarest of things: a Takeshi Kitano film by name, but not necessarily by nature.

And still, to think of this film as an extraneous, arbitrary impulse is a notion that just doesn't stick. Because as easy as it is to consider Zatoichi that one giant, moon-bound leap for all cinema-kind (in Kitano's universe, that is), those following his habitually single-minded biography of film must have surely seen this one coming. Granted, the boiling point had to be Dolls, an ultimate cacophony of art-house world-weariness and depressed semantics that angered the movie gods enough to result in this: volcanic eruption as mass tap dancing in clogs. It's the most celebratory and jubilant of endings – particularly for a Kitano film – and takes joy from the fact that for once, he isn't holding a gun to his head. Gone too is the emotional baggage and post-traumatic artwork, replaced squarely by a return to the jovial, comedic roots of yesteryear – but only in the sense that Kitano, as sort of a Japanese Letterman, is something of a nostalgic afterthought. Only, he still is that comedian, just not to Western audiences; the artistic persona having (with a few exceptions) overtaken and locked away the fun-making side for years. Yet with the possibility of an unchaining a distant but always inevitable thing, this year, Zatoichi serves as that release.