The samurai movie, like the Western, is a magnificant genre that’s not as widely appreciated as it should be. The plot is usually predicable, with romantic and didactic elements, law and lawlessness, locals and drifters, all mixed up in a sort of tense unfolding that leads to a few spectacular shoot-outs or battle scenes. But the variations are endless, and as such, these “forms” might well be compared to the Italian comedie dell arte, where Harlequin and Columbine, Isabelle and Scaramouche, Pulcinella and Pantaloon, charm us with their ever-shifting combinations of familiarity and surprise.
Occasionally a work comes along that knows and works all the genre stereotypes, while at the same time bringing added layers of richness to the surface. Clint Eastwoods’s Unforgiven was one such movie. So is Twilight Samurai, which won eight Japanese Oscars and was nominated for an Academy Award in 2004. It would be easy to imagine aficionados of the samurai genre being a little disappointed by the film, in fact. The action sequences, though excellent, are few and far between, while the storyline is so well-shaped that we’re left guessing until the very end what the outcome will be.
The hero of the tale, Seibei, is a low-ranking samurai who spends his days doing the books for his lord, and his evenings caring for his mother and two young daughters. (A widower, he had married a woman from a wealthy family, and impoverished himself on the wedding.) His collegues refer to him as the twilight samurai because he prefers to spend his evening making bamboo bird cages to support his family, rather than go drinking with the boys.
Seibei’s childhood friend returns from a campaign, and due to a freak of fortune Seibei defends the man’s sister Tomoe, (his own childhood sweetheart) against her drunken samurai husband using a wooden stick. Tomoe, grateful for her old friend’s courageous act, begins coming to the house to help him look after the kids.
Meanwhile, news of Seibei’s exraordinary event soon makes the rounds, and his colleagues begin to see him a a new light. In fact, as a result of complications in the ongoing political struggle that serves as a backdrop to the film, the clan elders decide to send gentle Seibei, the quiet maker of birdcages, on what appears to be a suicide mission to root out a renegade samurai who has refused to commit hari kari in honor of his vanquished lord. By this time Tomoe has divorced her husband, but Seibei is reluctant to enter for a second time into marriage with someone whose social station he lacks the financial wherewithall to maintain.
It’s a great story, full of nuances and complexities it would be pointless to describe in detail. Though it lacks the technical verve of the great Kurasawa films of the fifties, director Yoji Tamata demonstrates, with Twilight Samurai, that the genre is far from dead.
