13 Assassins (2010) — Takashi Miike
Another Japanese director tries to alert the world samurai era is over.
The old myth of Japanese samurais is passed its time. That’s what Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurais” said, and that’s what Takashi Miike’s “13 Assassins” does as well. Samurais are nothing but fetishized history. Even so, Takashi Miike’s story was able to bring up a reading on today’s Japanese society.
The director is one of Japan’s most famous, yearly presenting his films in international competitions and being recognized as one of the world’s most prolific creators, having made so far 100 films, with his latest “Blade of the Immortal” (2017). Westerns have called him the “Japanese Tarantino”, given his use of violence, but Miike is a show of his own. With a hundred films on his record, is hard to put a sure label on his work. He’s done from grotesque horrors to family comedies and remakes of everything, from mangas to video games. In “13 Assassins”, he did also mean to pay homage to accomplished pieces, such as “Seven Samurai” and “Harakiri”.
The plot follows the same story from Kurosawa’s. A group of skillful “ronin” is put together by a leader, Shimada Shinzaemon (Koji Yakusho) to defeat evil: instead of bandits, a cruel member of Japan’s feudal powerhouse families. Even the stray-dog character played originally by Toshiro Mifune is there, though much less significant and unable to maintain the popular appeal that “Seven Samurai”’s role managed to have. The characters as a whole are poorly developed, all being pretty much flat, with the exception of the villain, Lord Matsudaiga Naritsugu (Goro Inagaki), whose cruelness seems to be the main point of interest of the movie. Why can a man so powerful, who was supposed to be a leader of the nation, be so mean and void of emotions? The rest of the characters’s stories are shallow and leave the spectator wishing for something more than just a repetition of a plot recipe already seen in so many other, better, films before.
My guess is that director Takashi Miike wanted to try something that would appeal more to modern audiences, who are tired of the same heroic discourses of honor and duty. That would explain the exploitation of Lord Naritsugu’s psych: a bored rich man seeking some thrill, which somehow can be considered Japan’s condition in contemporary times. No more samurai-era moral standards; instead, gambling and prostitution, bribing and boredom. A view on social decay explained by traditional contents and a gloomy look added to good action scenes.
Other social aspect depicted in this film is a very anti-war perspective, rightfully common to today’s artistic environment in Japan. In a certain passage by the end of the film, Shinzaemon — the samurai leader — says: “I risked my life in this meaningless war for political power!”, a confession that basically says everything we’ve just watched was pointless. The theme is concomitant to times when Japanese politics are straight right-winged, but the population itself, even though assertively against the country’s involvement in any wars, does not seem to care much for “this meaningless war for political power”.
Now, for the women participation in the film, it managed to have an even smaller part than “Seven Samurai” or “Harakiri”. A woman speaks in “13 Assassins” about 4 or 5 times, just one woman actually, since the other female character makes a silent appearance of some 10 seconds top. It seems like, no matter how much the times have changed and how much war and politics are undesirable, it is still a subject outside of the “women’s world”.
