Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 12/07/24

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Saturday, December 7, 2024

Kiru (Kenji Misumi, 1962)

Raizo Ichikawa in Kiru

Cast: Raizo Ichikawa, Shiho Fujimura, Mayumi Nagisa, Masayo Banri, Jun'ichiro Narita, Matasaburo Niwa, Teru Tomota, Eijiro Yanagi, Shigeru Amachi, Yoshio Inaba. Screenplay: Kaneto Shindo, based on a novel by Renzaburo Shibata. Cinematography: Shozo Honda. Film editing: Kanji Suganuma. Music: Ichiro Saito.

I knew Kenji Misumi's work mostly from the Lone Wolf and Cub series, which is fairly unabashed in its bloodletting, so I was surprised by the almost meditative tone of Kiru, which is also known as Destiny's Son. It's the story of Shingo Takakura (Raizo Ichikawa) and his search for a father figure. When he comes of age, Shingo asks the man he thinks is his father for permission to go on what you might call walkabout: to spend a year wandering in 19th century Japan. He returns home with a secret: He has learned a mastery of an indefensible sword technique. Unfortunately, this mastery inspires an attack on his home, in which his supposed father is killed, but not before revealing to Shingo his true parentage. That sends Shingo on another pilgrimage in which he meets his biological father and eventually a father figure, Matsudaira (Eijiro Yanagi), the head of a powerful clan whom Shingo serves as a samurai. It's a film full of stylized combat and astonishing scenes that proceeds at a contemplative pace which belies its relative brevity (71 minutes): One tense scene, for example, has no background sound other than the intermittent call of a bird.