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MovieMail's Review
The maverick Japanese director's remake of Masaki Kobayashi's classic 1962 film, Harakiri, honours the great samurai tradition without being subservient to it, says James Oliver.
Fresh from 13 Assassins, Takashi Miike has remade another vintage samurai film. It's not just any movie he's re-worked, though: the original Hara-Kiri is an indelible masterpiece and one of the very greatest Japanese films. This version isn't that spectacular but it's a testament to the director's skill that it works as well as it does.
The plot remains unchanged. In feudal Japan, an itinerant samurai calls at the castle of a noble clan, requesting the honour of committing ritual suicide in their courtyard. While he prepares, he's told the unhappy story of the last young man who made such a request, but the painful tale seems to make our hero more determined...
Although it follows the same story as the original, it's a more emotional film, concerned with inequality and what it drives people to do. As with 13 Assassins, Miike honours the great samurai tradition without being subservient to it, adopting a classical style but infusing the movie with his own concerns: it confirms him as an essential force in contemporary Japanese cinema.
Hara-kiri: Death of a Samurai is maverick Japanese director Miike Takashi's remake of Masaki Kobayashi's classic 1962 film, Harakiri. It is a tale of revenge, honour and disgrace, centring on a poverty-stricken samurai who discovers the fate of his ronin son-in-law, setting in motion a tense showdown of vengeance against the house of a feudal lord.
The film is set in 17th century Japan. A samurai called Hanshiro (Ichikawa Ebizo) turns up at the Li household to request permission to commit ritual suicide after falling into shameful poverty. Suspicious of Hanshiro's motives, Li boss Kageyu (Yakusho Koji) tries to dissuade him from his path by telling him of the horrific fate of the last ronin to have made this request, a young man called Motome. Hanshiro appears undeterred, but as his own story unfolds in flashback it becomes clear that his true motives are very different from those he first declared.
