Saw The Great Killing, another samurai movie. This one follows a group of samurai who are conspiring to kill the next in line for the shogunate. They're planning on ambushing him and killing him which seems to be the only way anything got done in old timey Japan. The film opens with most of the conspirators being captured and tortured in horrible and graphic ways. This film predates some of the other samurai movies I've seen lately but it feels the most modern so far. It feels like a gangster movie, juxtaposing dry discussions of politics with frank violence. The fights in this film are shot on drunken-feeling handheld cameras, swooning around the action and intercutting jarring close-ups of grimacing faces or jerking bodies. The technique is very interesting, very visceral.
So, the samurais left over after the opening raid continue to plan the assassination, but each is haunted by the sacrifices they've made (and make throughout the film.) These are not the usual stoic badasses but quaking, haunted men, one of them explicitly insane with religious zeal. This surely does not feel like the usual, entirely justified insurrection of other films. The characters are motivated only by off-screen narration flatly telling us that the shogun is cruel. The ethics feel muddy here. The film finally crystallizes into a climactic street-brawl/sword-fight and things feel more comfortable then, but even there there's surprises and changes in expectation.
So, very modern and ambiguous feeling. Darker than I'm used to, which is sort of nice. I had a hard time following the politics of the film so I probably missed many important themes. Such is life. An interesting upset of the samurai genre.
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