Seven Samurai

http://www.colbycosh.com/#wess

We are seven

I spent the last couple of nights watching and thinking on Seven
Samurai, a work of art that must intimidate just about every creative
person who sees it. A lot of people who discuss Seven Samurai get
distracted awful quick: they offer ill-considered apologies for its
populist, audience-winning qualities--easy to overestimate, considering
the number of times it has been remade for Western audiences in
disguise--or serve up bull about the historical setting of the movie,
which is important as far as "It was a period of anarchy", and not one
bit further. Farmers vs. bandits: this is pretty elemental,
cross-cultural stuff. I wonder, do the people looking for a message
about Japan in Seven Samurai think Antony and Cleopatra is about Egypt?

It is almost as if, more than fifty years after the sensation created
by Rashomon, Western writers still believe Kurosawa was some sort of
genius naïf who somehow just sprouted like a plant in the soil of
postwar Japan. Seven Samurai is an awfully knowing film, isn't it,
coming from someone who was supposedly mirroring his culture passively
and regurgitating simple lessons from badly-translated Westerns? Is
there a screenwriter alive who wouldn't have been proud to devise the
wonderful, subtle misdirection involved in the plotting of Rikichi's
character? Rikichi is the farmer who first gets the idea to hire
samurai and fight against the bandits. From the first minute of the
picture it's obvious that something's gnawing at him; everybody in the
village has suffered, but Rikichi's rage is special. Kurosawa and his
fellow screenwriters drop hints in our path, broad enough so that we're
satisfied we know what's behind Rikichi's agony. "They tear infants
from the womb," he splutters about the bandits. One of the samurai
finds women's clothing in a sack in his house, enraging him. Ah, we
surmise, the bandits have killed his wife. And so we are very carefully
prepared for a devastating Act III surprise. An easy thing to forget if
you've watched the movie a lot, and a nice thing to rediscover.

The most indelible impression is left by Mifune, naturally. It is said
that he never, to the end of his life, tired of performing scenes from
the movie for fans. Mifune possessed (probably because of his
upbringing outside Japan and his lack of formal thespian training) a
bestial quality that always erupts right through the cultivated
subtlety of his fellow Japanese actors. Another thing I started to
notice in this viewing of Seven Samurai was the myriad of ways in which
Mifune's/Kikuchiyo's animalistic, literally wild nature is emphasized.
Talk about the role of one's life! Mifune plays up this character-theme
interstitially, by means of constant bellowing, cackling, and
scratching; but notice at how many points is it echoed and promulgated
in the screenplay. Consider the scene where the six real samurai watch
Mifune from a high cliff as he undresses beside a pool below a
waterfall, wades in, crouches, disappears underwater, and emerges
triumphantly with a fish--just as if he were a bear. Immediately after,
he ambushes the samurai whimsically in the forest--again, like a bear,
or perhaps an ape. Or walk backward to the preceding scenes, in which
Mifune keeps accosting Takashi Shimura, like a hound seeking a pack
leader, and finding himself utterly inarticulate, screwing up his face
comically--unable to come out and make the relatively simple request
for discipleship with which the boy samurai Katsushiro, obviously
brought up with a confident feeling for warrior directness encompassed
within polite forms, has no trouble.

Let it be remembered, however, that this wild creature's particular
brand of heroism stands in elegant counterpoint to that of Kyuzo (Seiji
Miyaguchi), the affectless master swordsman, the paragon of efficiency
and perfection who could be described metaphorically as a machine if
his fencing were not so beautiful, so floral. Miyaguchi's performance
is almost as memorable as Mifune's, or it would be if he were as
recognizable to Western audiences. The seven-ness of the samurai is a
red herring, in a sense: these two, I think, are the true thing. Do you
notice that Kikuchiyo makes his most terrible error when trying to
imitate Kyuzo's action in seizing one of the bandits' guns? And that
one dies revenging the other? It's rather amusing that the nonpareil
movie of male camaraderie, of sweat and leather and violence, has a
heart made from the stuff of philosophy...

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