http://movies2.nytimes.com/2004/07/23/movies/23SWOR.html
The Way of the Samurai, Followed by a New Master
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: July 23, 2004
The hero of "The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi" is a sightless fighter
who wanders through feudal Japan in the guise of an itinerant
masseur. Though he may be unfamiliar to most American audiences,
Zatoichi is a fixture in the pop culture of his native land, having
been the subject, from 1962 to 1989, of 26 movies and scores of
television episodes. (An ample selection of the movies is available
in subtitled DVD versions from Home Vision Entertainment.)
In all of them â" including "Zatoichi at the Blood Fest," "Zatoichi
Meets Yojimbo" and "Zatoichi Meets the One-Armed Swordsman" â"
Zatoichi was played by Shintaro Katsu, who died in 1997. Now Takeshi
Kitano, a monument of Japanese popular culture in his own right, has
taken up Katsu's sword in an act of brutal, loving homage.
Mr. Kitano, also known as Beat Takeshi, is a genre director who has,
with movies like "Sonatine," "Kikujiro" and "Brother," acquired the
cachet of an international art-house star. He has specialized in
variations on the yakuza gangster film, which makes "The Blind
Swordsman" something of a departure because Mr. Kitano has traded in
the yakuza's big pistols and dark suits for samurai swords and
traditional kimonos. But his new film, which opens today in New York
after winning prizes at festivals in Venice, Toronto, Marrakesh and
Catalonia (as well as five Japanese Academy Awards), retains many of
the hallmarks of his directing style. The grisly mayhem is balanced
by a quiet, precise sense of formal decorum, and a brutal, vengeful
worldview coexists with a disarmingly sentimental moralism.
Above all, there is Mr. Kitano himself, with his heavily lined,
impassive countenance and his bowlegged, stoop-shouldered grace. He
uses Zatoichi's blindness to emphasize the rocklike stillness that
makes him scary and charismatic. His natural grimace occasionally
twitches into a grin as he anticipates the next fight.
And there are plenty of those, because Zatoichi inhabits a world
overrun with corrupt gang bosses and their mercenary minions, most of
whom he dispatches with geysers of bright blood and overdubbed grunts
and moans. He is aided by a hapless, good-hearted gambler and by a
pair of geishas, one of them a transvestite, who are determined to
avenge the murder of their parents many years earlier.
The swordfighting sequences are more a matter of efficient carpentry
(or butchery, if you prefer) than inspired choreography, but there is
nonetheless a certain elegance to Mr. Kitano's methods. For all his
glowering deadpan, he is not without wit, in his Keatonesque acting
and in his direction. At several points, as if subliminally riffing
on the significance of the nickname Beat, he mischievously
synchronizes onscreen noises with Keiichi Suzuki's score, turning
offhand moments into self-contained musical numbers that foreshadow
the full-scale song-and-dance explosion that comes as soon as the
last bad guy has been killed.
Like many musicals, "The Blind Swordsman" works better in individual
scenes than as a whole. Mr. Kitano is not the most disciplined
storyteller, and the plot meanders along tangents and stumbles into
flashbacks, losing momentum for long stretches in the middle. It
often feels like many episodes of a serial compressed into a single
feature. This may, in the end, be easier to digest than 25 sequels
and a hundred hours of television. It may also whet your appetite for
more.
"The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi" is rated R (Under 17 requires
accompanying parent or adult guardian) for many bloody fight scenes.
THE BLIND SWORDSMAN
Zatoichi
Directed and edited by Takeshi Kitano; written (in Japanese, with
English subtitles) by Mr. Kitano, based on a short story by Kan
Shimozawa; director of photography, Katsumi Yanagijima; music by
Keiichi Suzuki; production designer, Norihiro Isoda; produced by
Masayuki Mori and Tsunehisa Saito; released by Miramax Films. Running
time: 116 minutes. This film is rated R.
WITH: Beat Takeshi (Zatoichi), Tadanobu Asano (Gennosuke Hattori),
Yui Natsukawa (O-Shino), Michiyo Ookusu (Aunt O-Ume), Gadarukanaru
Taka (Shinkichi) and Yuuko Daike (O-Kinu).