October 1, 2004
Kitano turns blind eye to tradition
By WALLACE BAINE
Sentinel staff writer
Imagine for a moment Mel Gibson reviving the "The Lone Ranger"
series and casting himself in the lead under a pseudonym.
That's roughly the effect in Japan with "Zatoichi: The Blind
Swordsman," a weird little samurai melodrama that combines the
talents of one of Japan's most respected actor/directors Takeshi
Kitano and one of its most well-known film characters, the itinerant
blind swordsman played for years in film and TV by the late Shintaro
Katsu, another icon of Japanese popular culture.
In a culture often characterized by its overt reverence, Kitano is
going against the grain here. Far from an homage to the Shintaro
Katsu films, this new film is a goof, maybe even a satire, mixing
slapstick-ish comedy and horror- flick bloodletting, not to mention
a showy but incongruous Riverdance-style dance number that's still
got me scratching my coconut.
It's as if Kitano one of the masters of the gangster-film genre
in Japan wants to counter the earnest, Quentin Tarantino-esque, we-
are-not-worthy super-reverence often afforded to the samurai genre
by dropping his pants at the idolaters.
Kitano working, as is his wont as an actor, under the name Beat
Takashi plays the title character, a wandering masseuse who,
despite his blindness, is a deadly assassin with the sword. (It's a
good thing the old man's blind, considering what someone did to his
hair. Kitano wears a burst of pillowy white hair, making him look
like Billy Idol's Japanese grandpa.)
The story, set in the pre-industrial 19th-century Japanese
countryside, will be somewhat familiar to any fan of samurai epics
(or Hollywood Westerns). A small village is being intimidated by the
corrupt Ginzo gang, regularly extorting money from townspeople who
barely have any. Meanwhile, a brother-sister pair of geishas (the
brother is a cross-dresser) plot revenge against another gang for
murdering their family.
Zatoichi just happens to be passing through. Thanks to a kindly
widow and her affable but screwy nephew, he gets involved in the
town's struggles against the Ginzo gang and meets the aggrieved
geishas.
As played by Kitano, Zatoichi is stooped and unremarkable, always
laughing at some internal dialogue. He seems serenely unaware of his
surroundings, until he attacks, then he's possessed of exquisitely
calibrated senses that allow him to kill with precision without
getting a scratch.
The violence here is a mix of brutal realism and cartoony absurdity.
For some unfathomable reason, Kitano created computer-generated
flows of blood that look faker than anything you'll see in a Pixar
film, as if the film were little more than an exercise in
incongruity (cheesy CGI blood in a period film?).
Zatoichi's fight scenes are done with swift and deadly force, but
when he tosses his sword across the room and it slides effortlessly
into his sheath on the fly, well, I only envision "Three Stooges"
tricks.
Only someone with the creative verve of Kitano an accomplished
painter, poet and cartoonist and a highly visible TV presence in
Japan could get away with such slapdash audacity. The film's
jerky changes of tone will likely prevent you from relaxing and
enjoying the narrative. But if you like to see what happens when an
artist is unbound by notions of dramatic consistency, this one will
have you dancing in the aisles, like everyone else on screen.
Contact Wallace Baine at
wbaine@....
If You Go
WHAT: `Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman.'
RATING: R: Graphic stylized violence and bloodshed.
WHERE: The Nickelodeon, 426-7500.
LENGTH: 1 hour, 56 minutes.
VERDICT: C+.