Kobayashi Masaki’s original “Harakiri” film, from exactly 50 years ago, earned praise as an “anti-samurai film.” It contained the requisite swords, slashings, and talk of honor, but it exposed that talk of honor as, in the case of those times (Edo period) mostly talk. It was a sad, ultimately terrifying story of one young ronin (masterless samurai) forced to commit ritual suicide (hara-kiri, also known as seppuku), and another, father-in-law to the first, going to the men who pushed his son-in-law over the brink.
Miike Takashi’s remake, “Hara-kiri,” which opened August 10th at the SIFF Cinema Uptown, cleaves closely to the original in many ways. It benefits from casting Yakusho Koji, one of Japan’s leading actors, as the clan leader, the man who will decide the disposition of both ronin. Imperious, stiff, and suffering from a bad limp which is never explained, Yakusho’s character betrays very little. The viewer must study the close-ups for crucial keys to his mood.
As the father-in-law who must come to a reckoning for himself and for his family, Juichidaime Ichikawa Ebizo, heir to a prominent kabuki acting dynasty, manages gruffly, although his performance can’t outstrip that of Nakadai Tatsuya in the original. Nakadai, 80 years old this year, made a living with his fierce eyes, prominent nose, thick black beard, and a low voice seemingly worn ragged after much shouting. He was perfect for the role of a man who’s gone beyond outrage, beyond humiliation; a man with only one job left to do, the conviction to do that, and the ingenuity to inject humor, irony, and revenge along the way.
The first film used history to comment acerbically on modern times. We live, the filmmakers said back in 1962, in a world where our strictures have outstripped our soul, a world where where we shame, frustrate, and kill innocents in the name of “the book,” and going by it. Both films use a ceremonial suit of armor to convey this metaphorically. Imposing and worshipped by the faithful, that armor is also empty. Containing and acknowledging no soul, it is not fit for worship, but only one man realizes this.
Sadly enough, shockingly enough, these lessons still sting. We have not known unceasing turmoil and cruelty in the last 50 years, but we have known torture for the sake of strictures.
Takashi adds a few personal touches which mark the new story as his own, even as they detract, slightly, from the film’s messages. The death of the younger ronin, stuck with a weapon manifestly unsuited for the task, becomes slightly more graphic, closer to gross-out, a sight bolstered by Takashi’s decision to work in 3-D. The father-in-law’s shaming of the clan works on two levels now, a crucial change for the final melee which adds to the symbolic sense but diminishes realism.
In the end, both films convincingly embody desperation. We are good people who have been ground down by bad times, the protagonists plead, and given just slightly different circumstances, I could be sitting in judgment of you, not the opposite. Not that any of the clan become convinced.
Kobayashi gave us the metaphor of a book at the end—the clan’s official history—and showed us how the losers were written out of it. Takashi opts for a softer, business-as-usual coda to the madness. Both of them warn us to search our pride, our allegiances, and especially our obedience, to see if we’ve dropped compassion somewhere in the grass.
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