the "dress rehearsal" that makes wonders on its own

Rating: 10/10 (3 May 2006)

It took a couple of times for me to really take everything in with Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha. The first time around I got about as engrossed as possible with the visuals, but at the same time got confused with some of the historical-side stories in the film. Which clan attacks who, which clan will dominate, who's flag is who's? But I did know the central story of Kagemusha, the shadow warrior, who is made by the (hidden) late Lord Shingen's advisers into the Lord himself to fool his enemies and even everyone else around him, was worth telling. So on the second time around as the story wasn't as much of the issue I watched the film to really get more into it, as it is a three-hour epic (Kurosawa's second longest film, minus the unseen cut of the Idiot), It's not necessarily a dense film though, which adds to the appeal of it- each scene has enough nuance and irony to cut into the impending tragedy that looms over the Takeda clan.
It's been said, most of all by Kurosawa himself, that this film was a "dress rehearsal" for his late masterpiece Ran. Ran is the more artistically overwhelming and incredible film, but Kagemusha on its own two feet is still a staggering achievement for a director with many great films. And he pushes ahead from his 70's films as his third color film, taking from his impressive storyboards (you can see the reprints in the Criterion DVD package), creating scene after scene where colors are heightened and returned and made precisely for specific moods and settings of the scenes. Him and Bergman are the first directors I can think of who were able to move from expressive black and white films into color and still make the personal style of certain scenes challenging and powerful.
Take the scene when Kagemusha is having the dream, surrounded in a sort of field of different colors and smoke, and the armored samurai pursues him. But the greatest sequence in the film, one that does go on par with the best sequence in Ran (the burning of the castle), is the final climactic battle-turned-slaughter. It's ironic that for a director synonymous with the samurai drama that he doesn't show any contact from the bullets to the charging samurai on horseback. It's all in the aftermath, the horses in slow-motion in the last throws of life, and body after body strewn with blood. Following this with Kagemusha's final stand as he runs madly through the field towards his end, it all marks as one of the supreme set-pieces ever done depicting the horror of sacrifice and futility of war. It's not one of the easier Kurosawa films in some ways, but it does contain really strong performances, as a fine interpretation of history. 9.5/10