THE BLIND SWORDSMAN: ZATOICHI

Country: Japan
Director: Takeshi Kitano
Lead Actors: “Beat” Takeshi (Takeshi Kitano), Tabanobu Asano, Michiyo Oguso, Yui Natsukawa, Guadalcanal Taka
Running time: 95 min.
English Subtitles
Rating: 14A (Frequent gory violence)

Winner of the Audience Choice Award at the 2003 Toronto International Film Festival, ZATOICHI is the latest film from Japanese master director, Takeshi Kitano.

Played by the late Shintaro Katsu in over twenty features and a television series starting in the sixties, the character Zatoichi has been absent from the screen since 1989. However, no one has forgotten the humble, roving masseur – blind, seemingly frail and jovial, but actually the most deadly swordsman in the country.

Kitano directs and stars in this astonishing contribution to a pop culture invention that has attained mythic proportions. Zatoichi arrives in a town dominated by gangs where he meets – and helps – two geishas who are out to avenge the murder of their parents.

Hattori (Tadanobu Asano, BRIGHT FUTURE), a stoic ronin tormented by his past, appears around the same time and takes a job as an assassin for one of the gang lords. It is inevitable that Zatoichi and Hattori, two lethal swordsmen, will face each other. It only remains to be seen who will be left standing.

The ZATOICHI tales remind us that appearances can be deceiving and, even as Kitano has relished the challenge of entering the franchise, few will be surprised that this maverick director has wrought some mischievous twists to both style and plot.

The film is a venerable grab-bag of cinematic genres and conventions and iconography; part martial-arts film, part love story, the film combines all of these elements to create something truly new, and builds towards a truly unforgettable climax. Kitano is as comfortable incorporating unexpected musical interludes as he is staging a final rampage in which all the villains get their due in a sequence evoking the infamous baptism-and-murder montage from Francis Ford Coppola’s THE GODFATHER.

The narrative is interlaced with extraordinary visions that relate more to Zatoichi’s legend than to the situations at hand: in one, he fights a double-dealing posse on a barren plateau as rain courses over bodies and stone, quickly painting the ground a bloody crimson. Even the work of peasants in a field is turned into a rhythmic dance. Kitano has taken the iconic heft of the silhouette of Zatoichi and placed it at the centre of some of his most stunning visual compositions to date. The result is nothing less than breathtaking.

“Kitano uses exaggerated acting, choreographed violence and, most radically, the rhythms of everyday life -- farmers pounding the earth, the syncopated plop of falling rain -- to turn this genre story into a crypto-Kabuki play and one blissfully idiosyncratic diversion.” - Manohla Dargis, Los Angeles Times