It’s the era of the Japanese Shogunate and Samurai Sozaburo Kano (Ryûhei Matsuda) and Samurai Hyozo Tashiro (Tadanobu Asano) have both been accepted into the militia. The film follows the intricate plot of twists and turns of internal troubles happening in the militia as romances ensue which all happen to surround this new young soldier, Kano.
The films plot works like an intricate murder mystery that takes way too long to get to the point. It begins simply with Kano and Tashiro being tested on their swordsmanship skills before they are accepted into the militia. Quickly it is seen that they are worthy and are accepted. Soon after Tashiro approaches Kano very suddenly and with little tact and even though Kano seems to be slightly reluctant, but in truth it’s all part of his disguise that he puts on so to create this twisted scenario in the militia.
With the use of some ineffective breaks from scene to scene the director tries to fill us in on information that either he couldn’t afford to shoot or he just couldn’t bother doing, the director decided at that point to completely alienate me. Even though the overall story I feel took way too long to get going I think that it’s sad that the director wanted to clue me in on all of this information that he couldn’t figure out a way to film ten more minutes so that he could tell me rather than just give me a text screen with it.
One part of this movie which I have to say I was knee deep in love with was all the fight scenes. Now don’t get me wrong, these are no Matrix or The A-Team scenes where everything is going completely wrong and waves upon waves of people are being destroyed by our protagonist. Rather it’s just these controlled sparring sessions mostly and usually two samurai are just going after each other and its filmed so simply. It’s obvious that the director knew he wanted this element to be as natural and truthful as possible so he went and cast actors which were skilled with a samurai sword. The camera never slows down for me and the actors never just go for the simple basic motions of the art just so that I can understand. It’s brilliant.
Acting wise I was disappointed, but I actually believe this to be a cultural difference more than anything else. In Japanese films I notice all the while that characters are hard to emote, which at times I believe is mostly because of the overly rigid culture that they live in. Add that to the fact that the film is set in the time of the samurai then you know that people were never that open with their emotions so it makes it hard to believe a lot of the scenes between Kano and others.
As taboo relationship films about homosexual relations go I don’t think this movie holds up against some of the more popular ones like Brokeback Mountain.
IMDB says 6.9/10
Rotten Tomatoes says 67%
I say 5.0/10