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| Tatsuya Nakadai in Seppuku |
I have watched a few days ago Kobayashi's Samurai
Rebellion, and I was left oddly unsatisfied. I had liked his Seppuku
a heck of a lot, but Rebellion just felt flat. It's true, however, that
the title of Rebellion has been translated wrongly: as far as I have understood,
the Japanese title actually refers to a rebellious woman and her plight. Which would have changed my
expectations, and as such, probably, my enjoyment of the movie. To watch
something called "Samurai Rebellion" and actually see a domestic
drama about the sad fate of a madam is a little disconcerting.
Then again, even apart from this matter, the movie just didn't have the subtle ethical
dilemmas and grim atmosphere of Seppuku. The main problems in Rebellion are the following ones.
1. The Lord of the land commits a set of abuses
connected to a woman and the people around her, which have to be sanctioned at
some point, even at the cost of a whole clan.
2. An individual cannot possibly be just the
network of social relations and obligations surrounding him or her, and the
main characters are trying to get a life apart from the social system they are
a part of - even at the cost of being crushed by said system.
3. There are vague hints that the actions of
the mean Lord were somewhat dictated by the official norms and traditions
themselves, so the woman in question was not oppressed just by a mean
individual in a position of power, but by the whole tradition she was a part
of.
4. There is duty, and there is moral right, and
sometimes they interfere and one has to decide, losing something either way.
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| Toshiro Mifune in Samurai Rebellion |
The thing is that 2 & 3 are at most hinted
at vaguely, while 1 & 4 are not
particularly interesting. Problem 3 is really
just one sentence uttered by Nakadai's character in front of the Lord, and
problem 2 as such is also mostly a sentence of
Mifune's, while in practice it gets overlapped by 4.
As to problem 4, we have several characters
trapped between the Lord's orders and the inner sense of morality, and while
Ichi's family chooses the inner morality (and die as a consequence of that),
Nakadai's character picks the duty (...and dies as a consequence of it). Then
we have Ichi & co's stubbornness against duty to the Matsudaira clan and
duty to their own family, which is unclearly presented as either problem 2 (individual desire against social system), or
problem 4 (inner sense of justice vs outer
duty, fight against kidnapping vs submission to the Lord's orders).
Seppuku's moral plight was much more continuous and smooth -
the unjustified aggressiveness of the Samurai Code in a time of peace, against
humanitarian (and probably deeper Buddhist) principles, and also its perversion
by the increasingly lax attitude of its practitioners. The ethical argument was
sharp and painful as a katana, the humanism was warm, laughing, crying and bleeding,
and apart from that, the visual metaphors were deep and compelling. Nakadai's
Hanshiro himself was more of a metaphorical archetype than an actual human
being, he was relentless retribution, a bleeding wound frozen in time until the
corroded blade that opened it was found and punished. Both movies end with the
two individual dramas frustratingly concealed by the clan officials, little red
specs crushed under the millstones of large-scale politics, but while Seppuku
takes it with a world-wrecking visual metaphor and a grain of cynical humor, Rebellion
whimpers and declaims.
Rebellion was descriptively, visually
and theoretically confusing. Not deadly confusing, of course, but still
deflating. I can only think of a handful of images that had an effect on me,
which is also why my analysis is so focused on the ethical part of the story.
Neither Ichi, not Yogoro looked like more of a sketch, and apart from some
generic "damn women had a bad fate during the Shogunate" reaction, I
never felt truly involved in their fate. Of course that playing ping-pong with
a woman's life is not nice, but come on, this was such a minor issue compared
to the problems from Seppuku - and to my own expectations when I read
the title of the movie. Isaburo felt more like a frustrated old man who is
trying to (almost forcefully at times) project his dreams of happiness on his
son, the Lord and the Intendent were typically bad guys, and Nakadai's Tatewaki
was more of an afterthought, almost redundant in the story. I believe that the
worst offender here was Ichi and Yogoro's life together, which was supposed to
be the portrayal of familial happiness. At least we're told so. In reality, it
was the same ritualistic stiffness - and I won't even begin to compare this with
the happy scenes from Tsugumo's life with his daughter and son in law. In fact,
if the happiness of the three Sasaharas had been actually shown, I think
that their subsequent plight would have been much more convincing. Of course,
Kobayashi doesn't do very much in the direction of creating an actual universe
behind the screen, his worlds look like artificial
compositions in both cases, but the construction from Seppuku is
so beautiful and complex that it pretty much catches life.
And I never really felt tensed - what I felt
was rather discomfort at the domestic conflicts, and toward the end a whiff of
irritation at stuff being blown out of proportions. Indeed, the latter could
have become a tragic cry of suffocation of the little human against the social
bulldozer, problem 2 was by far the most interesting one - and who knows, maybe
on a latter reviewing I'll focus on it and draw more from this movie. But this
time, it didn't do more than tug a little at the corner of my eye (or the
corner of my humanistic principles).
In conclusion, I am heavily tempted to decide that, in spite of its high praise, Samurai Rebellion just didn't work, at least not for me. Sure that my reaction to a movie is, to a certain extent,
influenced by the mood and state I'm in when I see it, and I had seen Seppuku
during a train trip, when I typically feel very relaxed and comfortable (and
open to whatever a movie is throwing at me). Still, I'm pretty sure that,
during the same train trip, had I watched Rebellion, I'd have had a much
less remarkable experience.
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