MOVIE REVIEW: Masaki Kobayashi, 'Seppuku' (1962) vs 'Samurai Rebellion' (1967)

In the following I will be talking about these two movies:
Seppuku (1962, directed by Masaki Kobayashi) 

click to read plot summary
and

Samurai Rebellion (1967, directed by the same Masaki Kobayashi)  
click to read plot summary

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. 

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.