Kagemusha (1980, Akira Kurosawa)

Quest Status: 751 / 1000

TSPDT Rank #544

It's been awhile since I've seen an Akira Kurosawa film for the first time. I guess the last one was Sanjuro a couple years back. Kagemusha has a few shades of that film in it, with a plot involving a lowly drifter becoming involved in the upper echelons of feudal society. There are also hints of Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, and other Kurosawa classics. But the consensus on Kagemusha seems to be that it pales in comparison to Kurosawa's earlier work.

Those who say this are forgetting one important thing though: this is Akira Kurosawa we're talking about here. It's impossible to compare Kagemusha to his earlier films. The use of vivid color cinematography - relatively new to Kurosawa's work at the time - gives the film a painterly style, foreshadowing the impressionistic qualities of later films like Akira Kurosawa's Dreams. Gone are the visceral, tactile battle scenes of Seven Samurai. Instead, we have a three-hour historical epic which is largely about resisting the urge to fight in an attempt to hold territory. When the film's climactic battle scene finally comes, the character's fates are already decided. There is the build-up to a fight, and then the aftermath. The viewer is never caught in the crossfire, which might have something to do with why the film doesn't get as much praise as some of Kurosawa's classics from the 1950s and '60s.

There's a resigned pessimism to Kagemusha that sets it apart from those earlier movies. Being Kurosawa's reintroduction to the world after a painful period of depression which left him mostly inactive for most of the 1970s, this film about a double living in the shadow of the man he is charged with impersonating feels deeply personal. Kurosawa almost certainly felt the pressure of living up to the Japanese public's memory of his past self, as well as the new audience which the names of executive producers George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola brought to the film. Kagemusha might not impress Star Wars fans, but it is a work of elegiac grandeur, signaling the return of a master throwing himself into his art as if it were the last film of his life.

 

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NOTE

This review is part of my new Tumblr blog Cinema Cycles, which can be found here.