Kiyoshi Kurosawa has done murder mysteries before – many, in fact. In his films, violence vibrates randomly in the calm of life, like a pond tormented by the leaping of a fish that has already disappeared back under the surface when you see the ripples. But the mystery is less about whodunnit than why, and what lurks deep in the human mind; traditionally in Kurosawa – perhaps especially in the serial-killer-by-proxy process Treatmentpossibly the worst horror film ever made – the killing is completely detached from understandable human motivation, carried out with a coldness that seems to be cultivated by the divisive conditions of modern life itself. There’s no reason why it should happen, but equally there’s no reason why it shouldn’t.
His new movie, The samurai and the prisoneris a departure, both because its mysteries are solved according to the rules of the Golden Age detective story, which it respects more than Knives came out movies; and because their resolution affirms the principle of humanity about the value of individual life, in line with the tragic philosophy of the film about the justice of God and the pointless brutality of bushido.
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The film is included 1578in time .“Warring States period” of Japanese history. During this period .“this period of war,” as the characters call it, feudal Japan has been in constant debate about something 100 years, and codes of honor about murder, which seem to glorify violence and cheap human life, are beginning to weigh on the daimyo Murashige Araki (Masahiro Motoki), who has turned against the all-conqueror Oda Nobunaga, and is now besieged in Arioka Castle (Araki and Nobunaga are real historical figures, and the date of the siege of the political war Arioka the film is very accurate). When a messenger from Nobunaga, Kanbei Kuroda (Masaki Suda), arrives with a proposal, Araki rejects his request; but rather than cut off his head, as tradition demands and Kuroda’s requests, Araki locks him in the basement of his castle. As he explains to his wife Chiyoho (Yuriko Yoshitaka), who also survived the religious massacre, he can no longer look at it; similarly, when a former friend betrays him and sides with Nobunaga, Araki refuses to kill the king’s prepubescent son, who is already being held as a hostage – even though the boy begs him. But soon after, he is killed, apparently shot by an arrow through a small crack in the open screen door, although no arrow is visible at the scene.
It’s almost a locked room mystery, and Araki approaches it like a detective, interviewing the suspects one by one – facing each other while kneeling on tatami mats instead of sitting on opposite sides of a designated desk in a country house – and doing timely forensics, testing theories about the arrow’s angle of approach and the archer’s antage. In the chaos, he heads down to the basement, where Kuroda is tied to a pillar, in the middle of a room with a flood of sand flowing like dunes in the Tarkovsky Room. Stalker. He gives his investigative notes to Kuroda, who quickly grasps the solution, and reveals his prison to him in the form of a riddle. The film, a series of mysteries linked with a final twist, will repeat this plot in its next chapters; Araka, trying to keep his people alive and his superiors on the losing side of the war, comes to trust Kuroda above all else, even as his prisoner plays mind games with him.
Although their relationship is similar to Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lector – Kuroda even beats one of his bodyguards to death, as Dr. Lector did to Miggs who was imprisoned with him. The Silence of the Lamb. But the mysteries they solve, four in all as the film takes place during the seasons of the annual siege, are like Father Brown stories; Kuroda surprisingly includes specific details of detailed episodes whose decisions contain a range of moral instructions. (Though it’s probably a Buddhist monastery rather than a Catholic home.) Honobu Yonezawa, who wrote the book 2021 a novel that Kurosawa is not familiar with, he is best known for his adult mysteries in the past The samurai and the prisoner he became a merchant; it shows the Japanese’s enduring respect for the classic English murder mystery, while allowing Kurosawa to further his themes with bat dialogue that recalls Masaki Kobayashi’s time as a student.
Like Kurosawa’s classic film, it’s a spy drama The Spy’s Wife, The samurai and the prisoner it is subtle only in its involvement with genre conventions, and it is also clever in restricting its action mainly to carefully controlled interiors. Kurosawa’s Arioka Castle films are well-set, with rectilinear structures, and scenes of adventure and slaughter in the courtyard, in the style of revisionist samurai films such as Kobayashi’s. Harakiri. In the decades after World War II, directors like Kobayashi used jidaigeki to develop a skeptical view of the culture of honor and military service; dialogue of The samurai and the prisoneroften exploring Christian and Buddhist ideas of the afterlife and divine punishment and reward, it is universal in its concern – and effective in the ambient violence that characterizes many of Kurosawa’s films. .“Killing is senseless” is the takeaway Treatmentand, but the difference is that in The samurai and the prisonerthis feeling is unheard but spoken, and nothing scary but rightly angry.
