Zatôichi [2003]
Director: Takeshi Kitano
Actor: Takeshi Kitano
A traditional Japanese film, misunderstood and under-rated, with people leaving the cinema half-way, and snorting derisively at the last scene, a large tapdancing act, featuring most of the actors and seemingly unrelated to the rest of the film.
Zatôichi, a sword saint – or kensai – is walking the earth like Caine from Kung Fu, hiring out his services as a masseur and spending his nights in gambling dens. He’s blind, and nobody knows that his walking stick is really a well disguisedkatana, the samurai’s sword. He keeps his profile low, and his identity hidden, known only as “old masseur,” presumably because otherwise he’d be challenged by everyone who could lift a sword.
He comes upon a small village where two yakuza clans are fighting it out for supremacy over the village, and is taken in by one of the widowed peasant women, living just outside the village. Her nephew spends his time by the old masseur’s side in the gambling dens at night, terrible at gambling and riding the wave of luck and fortune that the blind masseur seems to hold. They get caught up in the gang-war as soon as Zatôichi exposes the gambling den for cheating.
Meanwhile, a wandering ronin, a disgraced or masterless samurai, and his wife walk from village to village, looking for the man that disgraced him in a fight, causing him to lose his rank as samurai. His wife is ill, and in order to pay for all the expenses, he hires his sword out to the highest bidder, as a soldier, bodyguard or assassin. He finds work with one of the warring yakuza clans.
During the same time, the old masseur meets up with two geishas, who were orphaned a decade ago when their parents, and family were murdered by one of the warring yakuza clans in the village as they were looking for the riches of their father, a wealthy rice-merchant. They used the money stolen from their family to start their criminal operations in the village. The two, a boy and a girl, survived by pretending to be geishas and plying the men with alcohol and robbing them afterwards. They are looking for revenge.
All in all these three stories converge at the same time, in the same village, during the same gang-war.
I loved this film, and it’s the only film that can get away with the appaling CGI that makes up some of the sword fighting. Daki, go see this film.
