Monday, 26th March

Movies since last post:

Zatoichi Meets One-Armed Swordsman [Zatoichi: Destroy the Chinese Sword!]
Mrs. Doubtfire

I enjoy samurai movies. I realized yesterday that my first samurai movie had been Rashomon, which doesn't even qualify as one. It has all the wrong elements: 23 strokes exchanged? Tajomaru is hardly a samurai, adn the woodcutter's tale undoes everything samurai that is present in the story. I am familiar with Akutagawa's short story In the Grove, which forms the basis for what has come to be known as Rashomonesque: I suppose, the West, as the dominant cultural paradigm, gets to coin words that are actually inaccurate and misleading if one looks at the origin of it. Akutagawa's Rashomon is no less a moral challange to the mind than In the Grove, but the French certainly wouldn't have taken to "In-the-grove-ness" as well as they did to Rashomonesque. The word almost seems destined. In the process, Akutagawa is lost entirely, and the world gets Seven Samurai as the greatest Samurai/Western story ever told.

To me, for very long, Toshiro Mifune exemplified the typical movie samurai. Now, after watching Zatoichi, I prefer Shintaro Katsu's Yakuza swordsman. He is subtle, funny, elegant and capable of shifting from humble to brutish in a breath: Mifune is stuck forever in the Mifune shell. Perhaps Kurosawa never could let go of the investment the West had made in his movies with Mifune's gruff ronin, so casted Mifune in a diverse portfolio of roles, but in each of which Mifune, without fail, replicated something basic about himself. Katsu doesn't have the advantage of a mind like Kurosawa at his side, but without Kurosawa, Mifune hardly ever compares to the versatility that Katsu shows within a role that would easily be seen as confining. He is a clown, a poet, a swordsman, a tender lover and a paragon of virtue as the blind masseur. Mifune, on the other hand, even when playing a contemporary Japanese man, is the same gruff, growling brute incapable of much else than screaming "Baka!"

The opening sequence of Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo typifies the Zatoichi character: a man reduced to an animal, yet quick to poesy and murder alike. "Yet again, I have blood on my hands," he murmers, crouched in a rain-filled paddy, before he lures his assailants to his quick play of sleek blade.

I had seen Mrs. Doubtfire a long time ago, in the Assembly Hall in Budhanilkantha, a rather bad video print which was, nonetheless, very funny. Peter Jackson's Bad Taste, which now seems to be in very bad taste itself, is one movie that made me laugh the most: I have only laughed nearly as much since while watching Borat. What struck me most while watching Mrs. Doubtfire was not so much the movie, but the city in which it had been shot: San Francisco. It is significant to see familiar spaces in a story that is otherwise fantastical. That wall between the real and the unreal gets a shove, shakes a bit. Hollywood, as people across the globe think of it, and as homeless people in Hollywood see it, is not the same entity. The mind is forced to consume it as if it were a bony fish; cautiously feed on the fantasy, and separate the pointed intrusion of reality from it.

I have checked out 8 1/2 today. Bunuel's Viridiana and quite a few other movies also wait.