Kill Bill (Vols. 1 & 2 [2003/04])

Quentin Tarantino – whose fourth and fifth films these are NOT! – has made a career of picking like a voracious magpie over those shiny bits and pieces of cinema and pop culture that he can then throw into his own postmodern bricolage. In that respect at least Kill Bill is a model, a paradigm, a concatenation of different influences, homages, references, visual and narrative nods and winks, plagiarism and indeed self-plagiarism. It does not want for style, but said style quickly becomes wholly incommensurate to sustaining interest over the extended, almost wholly fatuous two movies here, which even taken together evince little more narrative tension and development than a Coca Cola advertisement. Self-consciously, self-importantly broken up (into chapters as much as films), it seems churlish to descry a cartoonish vision of and engagement with Japan in a film that can hardly (or, to be honest, fairly) be derided for a lack of realism – or, one should say, of naturalism. This is simply not Tarantino’s game, and nor should it be. However, what this offers instead, over the course of four plus hours, is at best negligible. 

Its ‘story’ centres on the Bride (Uma Thurman), who embarks on a revenge mission against an international group of assassins. Led by the eponymous Bill, said assassins attacked and left the bride for dead on the day of her wedding (hence the monicker), an event which would have solidified her estrangement from this gang and relationship with its head. For the bulk of part one, as she searches out her attackers one-by-one, this leads her to Japan, to Okinawa, in order to gain help (courtesy of the iconic Sonny Chiba with the loaded name Hattori Hanzo) and to Tokyo for revenge against the now-Yakuza boss Lucy Liu. Cue extended riffs on and references to samurai and yakuza films, and an extended set-piece that sees the bride taking on a veritable army of fighters. A glaring neglect of the logic of, among other things, the Bride’s physicality and recovery (from a four-year coma) – or Tarantino’s ignorance of left and right (watch for it!) – is ultimately less problematic than the almost complete absence of characterisation or narrative refinement. Characters are given backstories, but these are flimsy pretexts for affectations like an extended animated segment or similar flourishes designed it seems for the director to indulge himself and to pad out the running time. They add almost nothing to involvement or development, depth or detail.

The Japan seen here is one that has been disseminated throughout popular culture and cinematic worlds of genre cinema. Tarantino appropriately stresses artifice throughout, but the point of all this remains opaque. It feels like this vision of Japan means little in the diegetic context of a story that plays with filmic surfaces like a child plays with toys and merely shows off writing and directing. There is nothing with which to contrast said representation, no thematic point of reference to adumbrate its vision here other than the spectre of the writer/director lionising his own tastes. A professed inspiration for Kill Bill,  Lady Snowblood (1973) and Lady Snowblood: Long Song of Vengeance (1973) make much greater play with revenge, with narrative structure and with style and representation, and Tarantino’s work feels shallow and superficial in comparison.

Part II is less concerned with the Land of the Rising Sun, but is similarly almost wilful in its neglect of cogent development. China broadly replaces Japan here as the frame of reference for a US and Mexico-set narrative, where The Bride’s training at the hands of a legendary martial artist is sketched in, largely as a means of plot exegesis to push past a thorny narrative problem. This is unfortunate as there are nascent complexities in the final ‘chapter’ that are undermined by the fact that it has taken two movies and four hours to reach any climax. Bill and the Bride’s family relations, their daughter, their at once sexual, romantic and quasi-parental relationship has potential depths. There are intonations of a Svengali dynamic, one of an almost cult-like adulation giving way to and adumbrating other hinted-at relations, but it is frustratingly untroubled by real exploration; and there are deeply unsatisfying oversights like the young girl’s seemingly happy acquiescence to being taken by her mother after her father’s death even though her relationship with said father appeared to all intents and purposes a reasonably healthy and harmonious one: ‘Where are we going mummy and where is daddy? He’s what? He’s dead! Why? How? Oh, you killed him. OK, then, no worries let’s go?’

As a primer on Japanese genre cinema and a platform for the discovery thereof there is interest here. If viewers unfamiliar with Sonny Chiba or Fukasaku Kinji (to whom Part I is dedicated in the event of his recent passing) then all to the good, but many, many responses to these two works simply stop at lionising Tarantino’s perceived originality, style and vision or merely celebrate his postmodernity. Style is very much the substance here. If this excites one then fair enough: but a marker of an important director at the height of his powers is a step (or two…or five) too far. As a marker of his aforementioned self-indulgence Tarantino has recently returned to Kill Bill, offering both a single film (Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair) and an animated post-script titled Yuki’s revenge, made as an Anime. Both feel like doodling, and add/develop little of note.

The Sun (2005)

From the ridiculous to the (almost) sublime. The third in a so-called tetralogy of power (later completed by Faust [2012]) and the third detailing the complicated personal/private personalities of 20^th century political leaders, The Sun follows Moloch (1999) and Taurus (2000) and their respective explorations of Hitler and Lenin. After these titanic European figures The Sun examines Japanese Emperor Hirohito, whose reign encompassed an era of seismic change in his country. Like its forebears The Sun is not in any sense a biographical film. It is not a film predicated on the life-story or even on elucidating the personality or ‘real life’ of its subject. Rather, it is a chamber drama and a rather opaque character study that echoes the structures of its forebears; so, where Moloch depicts Hitler and Eva Braun secreted away in a mountain castle and Taurus features a dying Lenin ensconced in a rural villa, The Sun is set in the Emperor’s palace, a space not of living but, as depicted, of work and of safety away from the still-present threat of air raids (in a maze of underground bunkers), where the line between war and peace, life and death, seems determinedly blurred.

As noted, the film concerns Hirohito at a critical juncture in his life and the history of Japan. It is set between the dropping of the A Bombs and Hirohito’s historic renunciation of his perceived divinity, a liminal time when some of his advisors were still offering him ‘information’ about the ferocious fighting of his loyal subjects on the battlefield whilst Tokyo lays in ruins around him and proto-occupation forces are visible everywhere, even in the grounds of his Imperial Palace. Within said palace Hirohito spends his time at rest (though given to nightmarish visions), composing correspondences both political and personal (literally or as a dictation, though one with an apparent transcript taker), and indulging a pass-time in marine biology. He seems rarely at peace here, almost always in transit, underlining the aforesaid liminality. The aftermath of WWII saw this man, once the national figurehead of a mythologized past and lineage of descent from the Sun Goddess, now obliged to become un-deified before the nation, to surrender Japan to occupation and effectively renounce his rarefied position. Throughout The Sun he struggles to reconcile these opposing states of being, and both the historical and narrative centrality of Hirohito is questioned. Unlike Hitler and Lenin, he was not at this time at or even near the end of his life – indeed, his reign in Japan would last until his passing in 1989 – but there is a very real sense of transition and thus of impermanence here, and the death of his country (certainly as it had been) is visualised in extended moments of passage between his Imperial Palace and the headquarters of the US forces, through destruction, ruins, impoverishment, all of which he regards with a curious, ambiguous detachment.

In principle this is a markedly secular film (as Japan is, at least ostensibly, a secular country) and it addresses time in a way that fragments temporality, the linear temporality of divine rule, into concepts of the personal and the social, where time is strictly ordered around routine, ritual, and where the social imperative of progress would soon be made manifest in a Japan that was transformed into a Western-style capitalist democratic nation and free market economy. The sense of looking ahead, of socio-political development, of a future where transformation would be pronounced and in which the present was precariously situated at the confluence of the past and the yet-to-be, was fundamentally writ large in Japan at this time. The Sun effectively embeds this temporal complexity within a personal kaleidoscopic subjectivity of frenzied dreamscapes of past events and a seemingly becalmed contemplation of the immediate horrors surrounding him, as well as what this means going forward.

Hirohito, like Lenin in Taurus, is all-powerful and strangely powerless here. He is deified by those Japanese around him, but at times seems as though he is imprisoned, not able to do anything much for himself and perennially watched with a mixture of anxious concern, quasi-parental responsibility and almost morbid curiosity. Like Hitler in Moloch, who rails before others yet in private is wracked by fears of illness and impotence, the Japanese Emperor is also at once sure of mind – knowledgeable, passionate, curious – and seemingly anxious, indifferent on serious matters of state. This almost amounts to a personal panoptical visibility – reinforced when MacArthur spies on Hirohito during a meeting (in another echo of Taurus) – and remains central to Sokurov’s framing of the complex vicissitudes of power. Subverting Foucault’s notion of the self-regulation inherent in the metaphor of the panopticon (drawn from a system implemented in prison where prisoners were never sure when they would be under surveillance, only that they would periodically be scrutinized) is a fascinating way of questioning rather than simply depicting power here. Key to this director’s tetralogy is, as noted, this very theme – power – ostensibly notions of control, leadership, decision-making. Yet he probes rather than presents the subject. In point of fact Hirohito, like any Japanese Emperor throughout history, has no more political power or agency than any typical monarch. He is a figurehead; some have said he was a mere pawn or puppet and thus, arguably, the least powerful protagonist of the series. Indeed, the subject of selling one’s soul that frames the legend of Faust is rehearsed here through this character, though he is at once both Faust and Mephistopheles, angel and devil. 

Thus, where Hitler and Lenin may be perceived to have been entirely autonomous, singular in their actions, in leading their respective nations and shaping their politics and their practices, Moloch and Taurus suggest that it is only to the extent that others were willing to follow them that their power becomes embedded. In other words, it is not to politics, but, rather, to personalities that Sokurov turns, engaging only indirectly with questions of political agency, and The Sun extends this exploration. The protagonists in all three works feel in some ways removed from their actions, their socio-political and historical import and notoriety; but for the Japanese Emperor, presumed apolitical (at least as far as governing the country was concerned), these issues were more complex. His direct hand in shaping Japan’s militarism and ensuing conflicts in the 1930s and ‘40s was far from concrete. It was, and continues to be, debated, with arguments over his potential sanctioning of aggressions being countered by relating his actions purely to the necessity of keeping up public morale as the war effort waned. The Sun has no stake in this discourse; but there is a more pronounced sense of the shift and sway of a society in profound transition here. There is a more direct apprehension of the world at large, a world at a nodal, a crisis, point and contingent upon The Emperor’s views and actions, even though these views and actions remain ostensibly less of a concern for Hirohito than may be supposed. He states early in the film that he should be considered as human, but when Hirohito is obliged to venture beyond the confines of his abode in order to meet with SCAP General Douglas MacArthur he feels removed from what he surveys, as though looking down from some great beyond.

Moreover, once he finds himself in the presence of MacArthur, he seems bemused by his interlocutor, not by any social or political discourse but as though interacting with strangers is anathema to him. Indeed, as played by Ogata Issey (typically an actor known for quiet, introspective, gentle characters in films like A One and a Two [2000] and Tony Takitani [2004]), he is someone who seems to be wrestling with idea of a deity in a human body, someone almost unused to flesh and blood and who finds corporeality awkward and distracting. Witness the way he moves his mouth when listening or about to talk, as though practising not words, a speech, but speaking itself. This tension between what the character espouses about his divinity and his physical comportment is paramount, and it adds more of a thematic frisson to this film than either Taurus or Moloch owing to the perennial and ongoing nature of perceived divine lineage. It underlines the extent to which socio-political context inexorably shapes those at either end of the spectrum of social means; and it thus complicates notions of power in a country where the seats thereof are often complicated and difficult to discern.  

Emperor (2012)

The imposing and controversial figure of General Douglas MacArthur – leading WWII battle strategist and subsequent Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) that occupied a defeated Japan – has long been a figure of cultural notoriety and posterity in the US. The already-discussed MacArthur (1977) provided one such cinematic scratching of the itch to understand this man. Here, in the 2012 drama Emperor, US fascination morphs into something altogether more wide-ranging, one without hagiography but with a different focus that flattens out any direct address of this complex personage and regards him as a fairly remote figure, a puppet master with a belligerent sense of his own projects and practices. The narrative is broadly centred on an investigation, with SCAP as object rather than subject.

In point of fact this is much more a companion piece to Sokurov’s The Sun than to Joseph Sargent’s 1977 portrait of MacArthur. As played by (the not tall-enough) Tommy Lee Jones he is not the Emperor, even though he comports himself as such. The crux of the narrative is this man’s meeting with the actual figure of the title. Unlike Sokurov’s film, this God-cum-human man is not central to the narrative, appearing as a character only in the final scenes, and before this the plot turns on an investigation by the Occupying forces as to whether or not Emperor Hirohito should stand trial as a war criminal. Based on a true story, the protagonist, General Bonners (a bland Mathew Fox), is hired to ascertain said Emperor’s war guilt. He has a personal connection to Japan, an existing relationship with a Japanese girl he met in the US and whom he is trying to find amid the devastation wrought by the Atomic Bomb. Any potential conflict of interest in this is swept under the narrative carpet, and the romance is largely a non-starter, but it does provide some convenient details for the plot, such as the presence of the girl’s uncle and his ability to shed light on what has happened since the end of the war.

Emperor is at pains to offer a sympathetic portrait of Japan and its post-WWII plight, and though its narrative focus on the specificity of political and legal approaches to Japan’s Emperor and Emperor system is a particular and in many ways idiosyncratic example, it does manage to tease out some wider questions pertaining to the vagaries of individual responsibility during a period of social and political turmoil as in wartime. MacArthur all-but demands a certain outcome to Bonners’ investigation, whilst other parties stress a desire for a different conclusion. Retrospective decisions and hindsight figure greatly, as do current political agendas, making judgement, blame and guilt an ambiguous concept to clearly determine. These themes bubble under the surface, and though in general the film has something of a televisual feel, this elevates it into a sporadically interesting drama with some pertinent questions to ask and a sympathetic ear for its national specificities.   

47 Ronin (2013)

The legend of the 47 Ronin, one of Japan’s pre-eminent historic myths, has inspired, and been retold for centuries in, theatre, literature and on film. Key works by major directors like Mizoguchi Kenji, Inagaki Hiroshi, Ichikawa Kon and Fukasaku Kinji have extolled the values of honour, duty and piety that underpin this story of the eponymous masterless Samurai who, following the death of their Lord, spend a year in preparing a retaliatory attack against the man who initiated their master’s demise (through ordering his Seppuku following a manufactured transgression) before enacting their revenge. It was perhaps not quite inevitable that Hollywood would get its hands on this story. Given the national specificity of the material and the fact that it is by no means an action-oriented narrative (Mizoguchi’s work, in two parts, totals well over three hours and is given to) it does not necessarily lend itself to a Hollywood makeover. But nonetheless at a time when tenets of Japanese culture retain the fascination of many around the world it was felt that a lavish, big budget blockbuster could be wrestled from this material, even though it was a bout that many felt Hollywood lost.

Starring Keanu Reeves and directed by Carl Rinsch (heretofore a director of flashy short films) it should be little surprise that The 47 Ronin does not in any way treat the story in a manner that echoes its Japanese counterparts. Indeed, it is as far from the original thematic heart and historical context of said treatments, and the various Japanese treatments thereof (some of which – like Fukasaku’s The Fall of Ako Castle [1978] – have tended to emphasise action and spectacle) as it possible to get. It retains the blueprint of the story but reworks it as a post-Lord of the Rings fairy tale, a sweeping story encompassing isolated rural villages, haunted forests, castle fortresses, enemy strongholds and misty mountains. There are thankfully no eagles here, but in lieu thereof is a shape-shifting maiden and several associated fantastical creatures. One of these shapes-shifters is Reeves’ Kai, a mysterious ‘half-breed’ who is warily adopted, though treated with little beyond suspicion and antagonism, by a samurai clan, and who then joins what becomes the key vigilante retaliation of the myth.  

Also seemingly imported from Peter Jackson cinematic playbook are numerous helicopter shots sweeping over the protagonists as they make their way to their fateful conflict, though despite these there is little sense of an epic scope to the narrative. Indeed, the biggest problem here is not this film’s magical makeover. In truth the fantasy dimension of the story is not really an issue. If one is going to Hollywoodize the material, then why not dragons and shape-shifting entities? Indeed, with the story containing a legend and culturally disseminated mythology, then this is arguably as valid a retelling as any other, allowing a meta-fictional dimension that comments upon the story from the slyly knowing perspective of a non-Japanese cultural context.

What is a problem is the film’s dramatic structure. The conflicts that drive and resolve the narrative progress in such a cursory way that it has no real surprises. There is also no sense at all of any temporal or spatial development or progression other than the aforesaid helicopter shots. The protagonists could as well be travelling between neighbouring villages as across the country, and on successive hours or days as over weeks (or months, or indeed more. Who knows?). The substandard visual effects, especially in a prologue laying out the magical landscapes of Japanese history in a way that looks like a second-rate computer game, do not help here. They do not lend the film the epic scope so clearly envisaged so much as squash its cinematic pretensions down to an almost televisual size and aesthetic.

This is regrettable, as there are nuggets of interest throughout that at least sporadically enliven proceedings. Alongside what, in the narrative, plays out as an echo of The Last Samurai (in terms of a non-Japanese becoming embroiled in a Samurai conflict and with a subplot detailing a Japanese love interest), there is the overtly sexual, seemingly bisexual, presence of the aforesaid magical maiden, Mizuki. As played by Kikuchi Rinko (Battle Royale [2000], Babel [2006]) she is a defiant femme fatale, a lethal seductress whose almost hypnotic beauty entraps men as a matter of indifferent course but seems more flagrantly aroused when confronted by women. Her overtly sexualized physicality is most prominent when she taunts and teases Kai’s (apparent) lover, draping herself over her prone body in order ostensibly to toy with, but more pointedly to seduce, her. Little is made of this, and the potential demonization of sexual difference cannot of course be discounted; but by the same token the animation of sexual desire remains a potent feature of a text in which bodies are defined much more by violence than by sexuality. Where physical corporeality is transmutable and fallible as an arbiter of identity then sexuality as a fundamental aspect of selfhood is meaningful. Even the villainous presence of Kikuchi’s Mizuki is hinted to be as such because she is drawn to the power and the openness of Asano Tadanobu’s chief antagonist – because of the less stringent rule of law (of heteronormativity) that he may be argued to represent.

All of this suggests that the strictures (the restrictions) of Bushido – the code of honour, duty and sacrifice of the samurai – may perhaps twist and distort personal inclinations and human feeling and emotion. Kai’s purely romantic relationship is an ideal, but the sexuality of Mizuki is more earthy, more grounded. Indeed, it is only through Reeves’ eyes that she is seen as seen as inhuman – as a fox and a dragon – so that one can relate the danger she represents to her sexuality, her freedom from the straight jacket of doctrinal constraint and way of living. This is a clearly a threat and the narrative manifests this as a response to the actions required of the protagonist once their master has been slighted. It is a nugget of interest (yes, I found one) in a film that was released to little fanfare and forgotten seemingly before most viewers and critics had finished watching it.