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Kagemusha [DVD]

Director : Akira Kurosawa

Screenplay : Akira Kurosawa & Masato Ide

MPAA Rating : PG

Year of Release : 1980

Stars : Tatsuya Nakadai (Shingen Takeda / Kagemusha), Tsutomu Yamazaki (Nobukado Takeda), Kenichi Hagiwara (Katsuyori Takeda), Jinpachi Nezu (Sohachiro Tsuchiya), Hideji Otaki (Masakage Yamagata), Daisuke Ryu (Nobunaga Oda), Masayuki Yui (Ieyasu Tokugawa), Kaori Momoi (Otsuyanokata), Mitsuko Baisho (Oyunokata), Hideo Murota (Nobufusa Baba)

By 1980, as he was entering the fifth decade of his career as a film director, Akira Kurosawa was probably best known outside of his native Japan for his samurai films, including Seven Samurai (1954), The Hidden Fortress (1958), Yojimbo (1961), and Sanjuro (1962). While certainly entertaining and formally brilliant (as most of Kurosawa’s films tend to be), these films are relatively limited in scope; generically speaking, they are action films, comedies, and disguised Westerns.

Thus, Kagemusha, a vast historical samurai epic, was a bold step in a new direction for the great Japanese master. It was a film Kurosawa had been trying to make for more than half a decade, and it was only after American producers Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas convinced Twentieth Century Fox to pony up a million and a half dollars for the international distribution rights that Kurosawa could get the go-ahead. He had never made a film of this scope before, but he was clearly due. Only the third color film he had ever made, Kagemusha is a glorious masterpiece of both large-scale historical grandeur and intimate personal questions about the nature of identity and power.

The story is set in late 16th century, when several rival clans were attempting to unify Japan for the first time. It a time in which Japan was going through massive changes, both politically and industrially. In a sense, then, Kagemusha is similar to American Westerns set at the end of the 19th century, when U.S. was beginning to modernize and the old ways of the West were dying beneath the onslaught of the Industrial Revolution. In Kagemusha, this is most clearly epitomized in the introduction of the rifle to warfare, which forever changes the nature of the battlefield and the way in which the samurai fought. While Kurosawa’s previous films featured small skirmishes and hand-to-hand swordplay, Kagemusha ends with a massive battle of apocalyptic scale, in which the old ways are literally slaughtered in a hail of bullets.

While there are three rival clans vying for control of Japan, Kurosawa focuses on the Takeda clan. The clan’s lord, Shingen (Tatsuya Nakadai), is mortally wounded by a sniper’s bullet, and one of his last requests is that his death be kept secret for at least three years. To maintain this façade, his inner circle must employ a kagemusha, or “shadow warrior,” to double as Shingen. It turns out that the person who most resembles him is a petty thief who has been saved at the last minute from crucifixion (also played by Nakadai). Thus, the great warlord is impersonated by a common criminal, and once the thief takes over the role, he begins to assume Shingen’s identity, to the point that the two are no longer separable. For all intents and purposes, the thief becomes the warlord, which brings up a host of troubling questions about what constitutes one’s identity.

Interwoven throughout this story are subplots involving others in the Takeda clan, including Shingen’s brother, Nobukado (Tsutomu Yamazaki), who has doubled for him in the past, and Shingen’s son, Katsuyori (Kenichi Hagiwara), who is bitter because he was not named as his father’s successor because his mother is the daughter of one of Shingen’s rivals. The political and familial tensions cut through the clan’s grand aspirations of complete control, constantly reminding us that even the greatest powers are ultimately human. To this end, the film is replete with a dark irony not typical of Kurosawa’s humanist tendencies. There is something almost absurd about the narrative, in which a thief is treated like a lord and comes to think of himself as the lord, but is in reality only a “shadow.”

Kagemusha is one of Kurosawa’s most intensely visual films, which some have argued is the result of the long gestation period before it was made. For five years Kurosawa painted hundreds of images that would serve as storyboards for the film; thus, he had it completely mapped out in his head before he ever stood behind a camera. The painterly images throughout the film are stunning, as Kurosawa deftly mixes realism with artistic flourishes and splashes of surrealism. An early battle scene is intensified by setting it against a completely blood-red sky, which introduces an element of bold theatricality that in no way diminishes the impact of the violence. Wide-angle shots of enormous armies marching across the land have a rousing sense of scale.

Yet, for all the film’s visual power, Kurosawa often goes against expectations by leaving some of the most crucial events completely off-screen, thus relegating them to the viewer’s imagination. It also allows him to emphasize the results of the events, rather than the events themselves, thus eliding sensationalism for its own sake. For example, the final battle, toward which the film has been steadily building, takes an enormous risk in leaving virtually all of the fighting off-screen; instead, Kurosawa focuses on the reactions of the leaders as they watch their men dutifully march to the slaughter and then a heart-wrenching series of nearly static images of the aftermath, punctuated only by the slow motion death throes of soldiers and horses that stand in visually for the death throes of a dream destroyed. It’s the most chilling sequence of any of Kurosawa’s film.

In Kagemusha, almost 40 years after his directorial debut, Kurosawa found his most authoritative cinematic voice at a time when his career was most in jeopardy. Even after numerous international successes early in his career (starting with 1950’s Rashomon), the 1970s had been a difficult decade for him, and there was a point at which it seemed that he might not make another film. Thankfully, that was not the case, and Kagemusha, which shared in the 1980 Palm d’or at the Cannes Film Festival, reignited his career, leading to a final stage of production in the 1980s and early 1990s that ensured his lasting legacy.

Copyright ©2005 James Kendrick

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All images copyright © The Criterion Collection