Japanese historical costume dramas are called jidaigeki. Some jidaigeki are about samurai, but not all of them; and even when they are, they need a certain vibe to be considered a chanbara – literally ‘sword fighting’ – film. They’re analogous to the Western, with a bit of Old Hollywood swashbuckling panache thrown in for good measure. The acknowledged master is Akira Kurosawa, who gave us Yojimbo and Seven Samurai, but it’s a broad church, encompassing the exploits of blind swordsman Zatoichi, wandering assassins Lone Wolf and Cub, and many, many more.
Both Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai and Blade of the Immortal are samurai movies but they’re coming at the subgenre from entirely different directions and with entirely different goals, a perfect illustration of how colourful and diverse the world of chanbara is. Cue them up back to back for a fine evening of sword-slinging cinema.
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
‘Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai’. Source: Distributor
Indeed, Louie once saved Ghost Dog’s life, an act that put the portly professional killer on the samurai path (in a nod to Kurosawa’s Rashomon, every time the film flashes back to this incident, it’s slightly different). What unfolds is a lo-fi, street-level, meditative action movie, with Ghost Dog waging war on the mob in his own unflappable, Zen style.
An effortlessly smooth treatise on fate and loyalty, Ghost Dog moves to hip hop rhythms; Jarmusch draws parallels between Zen poetry and rap, even going so far as to draft martial arts movie maven RZA to do the score. With its modern, globally western take on samurai tropes, the film also recalls Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï, which saw Alain Delon as a similarly detached and stoic killer. Yet Ghost Dog is defiantly its own beast, prowling a world where mafia wise guys profess their love for Public Enemy, hitmen communicate by carrier pigeon, and the way you die and the way you live are of equal importance.
Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai airs Thursday 30 March, 10:55pm on SBS World Movies (No catch-up at SBS On Demand)
Blade of the Immortal
Far more chaotic but just as cool is cult director Takashi Miike’s 100th (!) feature film, the Japanese-language Blade of the Immortal (2017), based on the popular manga of the same name by Hiroaki Samura. Our hero is Manji (Takuya Kimura), a samurai-rendered immortal by being implanted with ‘blood worms’ that will heal any injury no matter how grievous (a much more visceral riff on Highlander’s immortal swordsman trope). Recruited by a young woman, Rin Asano (Hana Sugisaki) to help her get revenge for her murdered parents, he finds himself facing off against Kagehisa Anotsu (Sôta Fukushi) and a cult of lethal assassins.
Blade isn’t for everyone. While the plot twists and turns to a sometimes confusing degree, what lingers in the memory is the carnage. Blade of the Immortal is almost cartoonishly violent, with director Miike – who first came to the attention of Anglophone audiences with the controversial horror movie, Audition (1999) – revelling in showing Manji carving his way through hordes of opponents while racking up horrifying wounds on his own unkillable corpus. It’s a live action anime, really, not a million miles away from Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City (2005) – the cast may be human, but the world they inhabit runs by the Rule of Cool, where an eye-poppingly OTT action sequence is its own justification.
(NOTE: Blade of the Immortal is currently unavailable at SBS On Demand.)
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