13 Assassins

Director: Takashi Miike

Starring: Kôji Yakusho, Gorô Inagaki

Run time: 141 minutes

Rating: ***

To glance back over Takashi Miike’s career in film is to subject oneself to some of the strangest, most disturbing scenes in cinema history. From fully grown humans giving birth to, well… fully grown humans (Gozu), to sliced off faces (Ichi the Killer), to catatonic lactating women (Visitor Q), one might wonder, after having directed over 70 productions, whether Miike’s well of perverse possibilities might be running dry.

13 Assassins sees the notorious director moving in new directions, and embracing a form which seems in some ways more mature than the twisted and bloody yakuza dramas he is most well-known for. Nonetheless it is a movie which shows us that Miike has certainly not lost his flair or identity as a director, despite this change in topic. Managing to seamlessly marry his taste for the bizarre with the established and structured jidaigeki form, he makes it his own, and injects life into the somewhat stagnant genre. The insertion of trademark Miike moments never jar with the overall tone of the movie, as one might be inclined to expect. Instead they often add a sense of (quite literally) dumb horror, or alternatively odd moments of comedy, which are distinctly refreshing.

However, unique as Miike’s quirks may be, one can hardly fail to notice the movie’s inevitable tie to its filmic ancestors; in particular the father of the genre, Akira Kurosawa. This is something which holds the movie back. Miike establishes a team of 13 samurai who will ambush the tyrannical Lord Naritsugu in order to restore peace to the realm, much in the same way as Kurosawa introduces his seven samurai, who seek to ambush bandits intent on pillaging a small village. 13 Assassins is even replete with a distinctly Kurosawan commentary on the arrogance of the samurai, and a bandit character who is a blatant cariacature of the wonderfully charismatic Kikuchiyo. It is perhaps this intertextuality which is one of 13 Assassins’ most unfortunate downfalls. Having almost twice as many samurai and almost half as much tension, viewers find themselves unwittingly making negative comparisons.

But make no mistakes about it 13 Assassins is a solid film in its own rite. When compared to Seven Samurai so many chanbara fall short, but this does make them any less valid as independant works of art. The slow pace 13 Assassins renders its long-awaited climax scintillating, as a brooding sense of tension is crafted over ninety minutes of conference and character development. The film ends on a blistering fifty minute battle scene where we see exploding cattle, fancy sword-play and perhaps most memorably, torrents of blood raining from the sky. Whilst the movie’s use of set-pieces, and the choreography of sword-fights is nothing less than spectacular, at thirty minutes in the scene begins to slow, the violence becomes saturating, and the dramatic effect of such gore inevitably begins to wane. This is unfortunate, as a basic issue of restraint compromises a denouement which begins to reek of squandered dramatic potential.

Lost Highway and Subjective Identity

Ed -Do you own a video camera?
Renee Mason - No. Fred hates them.
Fred - I like to remember things my on way.
Ed - What do you mean by that?
Fred -How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened.

It would be fair to say that I am a fairly long-standing fan of the work of David Lynch, a man who might be named by some, the king of American surrealism. Having watched all of Lynch's works except the infamous Lost Highway numerous times (mainly in order to grasp an understanding of them) one begins to notice a trend within his work toward making movies about making movies. A stance which actively encourages viewers of his films to read the film's message against itself. For example, in Inland Empire we have the idea of the cursed Polish production being told through the medium of film itself. Alongside this we have the suffocatingly disorienting confusion between what we believe to be the actual movie script, with the script of the fictional movie, which is being filmed within the film. However, to take a step back, we realise that there is no confusion at all, because Lynch has intended for the script to act in this way. What I'm trying to say is, to gain meaning we must take a step back, out of the layers of film. Mulholland Drive also demonstrated this layering effect with Naomi Watts' character (Betty/Diane) playing the role of an aspiring actor, Justin Theroux's character as a director, and a whole host of peripheral characters working on film sets, where the mark at which we place reality becomes lost. I was, then, fairly unsurprised to find Lost Highway addressing similar issues. After a single viewing I cannot claim to have come anywhere near unravelling the many mysteries and layers of the movie, but one thing I have taken away stems from the quote above. Relatively near to the beginning of the film Fred admits to a police detective that he does not like video cameras, he prefers to "remember things [his] own way" explaining that his own memory of things would therefore not, neccessarily, be synonymous with the general consensus of 'history', and past events - the objective history. Throughout the movie there is a confusion of identities. Our protagonist Fred, somehow transforms into another person, Al, who then acts out what we could (feasibly) assume to be a warped account of his past. Similarly Fred's wife Renee seems to shift her identity, becoming Alice Wakefield, the fancy woman of a kingpin. This masking and switching of identity seems to be linked to the idea of subjective, or personal memory, and the idea that history is not completely unchangeable, but, rather, amorphous and impressionable. Once this transformation of identity takes place, we enter into an unpredictable internal world, where objectivity becomes an obselete and, in fact, impossible stance. Instead characters become for themselves, and for others, who they want them to be. Our own faith in the objectivity of film clashes violently with the subjectivity of the characters, who attempt to sabotage what we would perhaps label the 'rational' in favour of the irrational and internal rule of the mind. We are presented with a clash between the subjectivity of human life, and the objective classification enacted by machine. We find, then, that only when the movie's disconcertingly creepy "Mystery Man" comes along with his camera, does Al, Fred's alter-ego, or adpoted identity begin to falter, the subjective construction of 'reality' crumbles, and objectivity 'history' prevails. Through the medium of the camera Al transforms back into Fred. For me, this moment where through the lens of the video camera things become 'real', presents the only genuine exit from the internal, fictional, world of subjectivity - and promises a re-immersion in a world of the camera, which is once again objective. I guess the movie taught me to perhaps see people through a kind of metaphysical video camera. Where feelings, wishes, desires and the warping and distorting power of the mind is sidelined in favour of an all objective frame of view. Perhaps, by evaluating human relationships through this lense of objectivity one can have a clearer view of things, instead of evaluating things according to subconscious and unplaceable desires which are, perhaps, at work without us realising. Lynch seeks to question us further than this though, about the nature of reality, and the idea that a physical manifestation of a personality may be radically different to the body they inhabit. Similarly we pose ourselves the question of whether there can ever be an objective meaning of objectivity itself, and in essence, whether we can even be sure that there is a shared, and objective view of 'history', and not just a web of subjective realities? But I think I'll leave those big questions for another day, to be answered after another viewing. Nevertheless it cannot be denied that Lynch poses these questions very carefully, encouraging us to think about not just our human relationships, but the trust we put in our own perceptions, and our own constructions of 'reality'. I'm sure that on successive viewings more will be illuminated, and the layers of film will reveal themselves. But for now, adieu!_________________________________________________________
THIS IS NOT AN EXIT.