Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island

Saw Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island, the final part in the Samurai trilogy. As I predicted, the younger sexier samurai from part 2 is the antagonist this time. The protagonist, Musashi, is scheduled to fight with him but begs a rain-check of one year. In this year, he settles down in a farming village which is beset by bandits. Once the bandits learn that he's there though, they leave the village alone. By his mere presence and reputation, he brings peace to the land. This shows us that Musashi has attained the highest, almost metaphysical, level of swordsman-ship: he no longer even needs to raise a sword to win the day.

Before the great showdown duel, he must also deal with some loose ends (ie women) in his past. One is the daughter of grave-robbing woman from part one, now a cortesan, the other is a girl from his home-village (and, according to Japanese tropes, therefore his destined true love.) They vie over him but of course he is a stoic lone wolf, with eyes only for the young samurai who he yearns to cross swords with.

This film is about Musashi living as a true swordsman. There's the mcguffin of this showdown which is necessary to prove that, yes, he is actually a master swordsman, but there's no training montage. He's already at that level at the start of the film. There's some making amends business with the women which seems soul-settling and spiritually significant, but this reads as plain old character development to me.

As he lives as a farmer, he takes up wood-carving. Initially he carves figurines of the two women until they are dealt with. Then he carves a statue which we never see clearly but which I believe is the rival samurai. Finally, just before the great duel, he carves a sword. Yes, he's a samurai now by golly.

An interesting film, I found the quasi-spiritual stuff hard to follow and kind of opaque and (being kind of a weenie myself) I'm very sympathetic to his girlfriends' requests for him to stay and not fight the duel, but this is not that kind of film. This is a film where men are men and swords are sometimes symbolic.