Seven Samurai (1954) — Akira Kurosawa
An action classic, that produced classics, made with multidimensional creativity.
“Seven Samurai” and director Akira Kurosawa are such magnetic figures in Western culture that the amount of reviews and references available is astonishingly confusing. So I’ll just try to give a general, really personal, account of this classic.
Kurosawa can be said to be one of the geniuses behind Japanese cultural influence — or soft power — today because of how much sense he made of the bridge between East, more specifically Japan, and the West. And even if it’s not pleasant to admit to oneself, Eastern culture is only considered valuable if it makes sense to white audiences and critics, who are still the Men. Like Natsume Soseki and Murakami Haruki did in the literary field, he managed to keep aspects viewed as essentially Japanese while telling a story in a format understandable to other audiences. The same goes for Bollywood and Hong Kong kung fu frenzy films. What’s even more interesting and peculiar about Kurosawa and “Seven Samurai” is how they both influenced and even changed Western cultural world, inspiring among others George Lucas and his Star Wars series — here’s an interesting video that explains it succinctly.
Years of immersion in Westerns, John Ford, Shakespearian narratives and jidaigekis (period Japanese stories) are what brought Akira Kurosawa to patiently await for the right time to make the most expensive production ever made in the country at the time. Past “Rashomon” and “Ikiru”, the director was already a big shot in the cinema industry and that’s how he managed to face Toho studios’ production restrictions. In later interviews, he claimed Japanese studios were accustomed to a kind of money that was too cheap if compared to Hollywood productions and this kept Japanese films from being the best they could be.
And indeed “Seven Samurai” is the best of the best. The best location; the best actors; the best script; the best use of camera, nature and soundtrack — all handpicked meticulously by Kurosawa and his frequent collaborators. It’s a story we are nowadays used to: a poor village is being attacked by bandits and needs some sort of heroic figure to help them out. This heroic figure is Kambei Shimada (Takashi Shimura, the same from “Ikiru” and a member of the Kurosawa family), a ronin — a samurai with no lord— that, despite the risks and lack of glamorous action, decides to help the desperate farmers and assembles a team of six other samurais and one samurai-wannabe to protect the village.
The characters could be discussed in another full post, being all very strongly defined and well played and directed. Even the only female character in the film, Shino (Keiko Tsushima), has her naive and fresh characteristics clearly put out. But the one that drives all the attention from the audience, and the narrative actually, is the character played by the iconic actor Toshiro Mifune, Kikuchiyo, who does not come from a samurai family but is in fact son of farmers just as the ones they are assisting. He is the exact opposite of Kyuzo (Seiji Miyaguchi), a serious and focused warrior inspired by the legend of Musashi and the most skilled of all the seven samurai. Kikuchiyo is scandalous; gets himself involved in petty fights; drinks too much and doesn’t know how to properly use a sword or how to ride a horse. Nevertheless, he is the member with who the farmers can most relate to; a peasant who managed to break the barriers of social class and be the thing he always aspired to be. That’s why he is important for the story itself. Without him, this would be just one more samurai tale of bushido code and traditions, but no, it’s much more inventive than that.
Inventiveness, as a matter of fact, is one of Kurosawa’s legacies. According to the many fonts of material on his work, he was the first to make brilliant use of natural elements, such as the wind, or the light that shines in from behind tall trees, or even the shadows or the rain, as it is the case in “Seven Samurai”. The image is composed frame by frame, in a way that everything had to be fluid, like the human waves he often created with groups of extras, like the peasants from “Seven Samurai” running from one direction to another in despair and fear of the bandits.
Also, this is a film that is important to understand what were those essential cultural elements for what we understand as Japanese. The whole plot surrounds the exemplary samurai and the bushido code, meaning it is a heroic saga of seven men protecting the powerless, despite the odds against them, with honor, loyalty, brains, hierarchy and struggle. But still Kurosawa tries not to inferiorize the peasants that much. The events only start taking place because the village gather to decide what’s the best thing to do. An individual by himself is weak, but the collectivity is powerful. That is a strong, if not the strongest, message in the film. That’s why each person — each social type — has to follow their social duties, from lonely samurai to poor farmers, on behalf of the whole. If not, they can go along with the bandits, or strive to become like Mifune’s character: the last of the seven samurai.
The female character of Shino is the best example of Akira Kurosawa’s perspective on social types and duties. She’s a young, beautiful and strong girl, whose father is worried the samurais will steal her away from him. So he cuts her hair and makes her look like a boy. However, the disguise was not enough to stop Isao Kimura (Katsushiro Okamoto), the youngest of the seven samurai, from falling in love with her. Actually they both fall for each other, but, when it comes the time to face their responsibilities and the consequences of their relationship, they can’t avoid taking distance from each other, and so the film ends peacefully.
