Saw Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto, the first in a trilogy of samurai films about this guy becoming a super-cool samurai. The film starts with the protagonist (who is at this point known as Takezo) hungering for glory in the nearby wars. He runs off with his friend to join them but arrives too late. The friend runs off with some shady battle-field corpse-looting woman and her daughter. Our hero returns to his village where he is hunted down like a dog, being suspected of being a deserter or something. The bulk of the film takes place here, with Takezo living like an animal, stealing food and beating up random people he comes across, to save himself from being turned in. We start in these mean surroundings to provide contrast for the alter films, when the noble greatness of samurai-hood happens.
The film was sort of confusing. It's short on explanations and often jumps forwards in time without any helpful "3 years later" subtitle. It is seemingly always a sweltering summer. A character who we met earlier is now in the imperial palace. How has this happened? Some of my confusion is also cultural. It's unclear to me why a kindly monk turns torturer at one point. There's a harsh, didactic feel to much of the proceedings that I think is just due to the nature of epic tales like this. We're meant to see some tough guy get humbled, achieve enlightenment, become a man. How can we convey that this is important if it's not counterintuitive and hard-won? Like many already-adult-becomes-man stories, I found this a bit dour, but it's enjoyable in its self-serious solemnity anyway.
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