The Mountain Moves

Rating: Null/10 (23 February 2015)

"Do not fear when the earthquake comes, and the mountain falls into the sea." - Psalm 46:2
On December 22nd, 1971, Akira Kurosawa slid his body into a bathtub and slit his wrists with a blade. He was hospitalised and recovered several weeks later.
Biographies differ on how many times Kurosawa slashed himself, but most agree that the 1971 incident was the last of at least a half-dozen other attempts at self-harm or suicide. Why did Kurosawa want to kill himself? Biographies typically offer a cocktail of explanations: depression, existential crises, a family history of suicide (his brother committed suicide in 1933), the critical and financial failures of his recent films and so forth. Whatever the reason, one thing remains clear: the once mighty director had been dethroned, humbled and so forced to reassess his powers, position and life.
Similar themes run throughout Kurosawa's "The Shadow Warrior". Released in 1980, it stars Tatsuya Nakadai as Takeda Shingen, a Japanese warlord who rules during the Sengoku period (1460s - 1600s). Nicknamed "the mountain" ("A mountain does not move," Shingen tells his generals), Shingen is feared by all rival warlords. They perceive him as being omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. His presence looms menacingly over all of central Japan.
But Shingen's begun to confront his own mortality. Making preparations for his death, he's arranged for body-doubles to take his place should he die in combat. These doubles are designed to stave off death, to preserve Shingen, to offer him some semblance of immortality in the face of a Nature expert at dethroning arrogant humans. But will they work?
Midway in "Shadow Warrior", Shingen is killed by a sniper's bullet. Kurosawa films this sequence like a police procedural, Shingen's rivals attempting to ascertain how one of their own snipers – a lowly moral – proved capable of downing a God like Shingen. Hilariously, even when all indications point to Shingen having been killed, these rival warlords refuse to believe the evidence. Afterall, mountain's do not fall!
Odd for an epic about warlords, "The Shadow Warrior" thus concerns itself not with combat, but with espionage. Every warlord in Japan is busy sending out spies, each desperate for irrefutable evidence that Shingen has fallen. These warlords become increasingly uncertain when Shingen's doubles and generals begin launching attacks on rival kingdoms. Are these attacks proof that Shingen is still alive? Why would Shingen's generals attack others without a mountain on their shoulders?
Before he died, Shingen provided his generals with clear instructions: should he be killed, they are to cease attacking rival kingdoms and focus instead on territorial defence. Whilst Shingen's tactical conservatism baffles his generals, they make increasing sense to Kurosawa's audience. Afterall, if the mountain has proved to be fallible, why risk further losses by attacking rivals? More importantly, if all previous certainties have revealed themselves to have rested on sheer belief, on sheer shared delusion, then what other assumptions might be toppled?
These issues of "belief" become the chief theme of Kurosawa's final act. Here Shingen's men hold fast to their insane convictions; they are invincible, they are mountains, they are Shingen incarnate, they tell themselves. But of course they are not. And so frauds, impostors, doubles and soldiers die on a battlefield, hundreds slaughtered, arrogance giving way to defeat, egos giving way to death. "The fifty years of a man's life are short compared to that of this world," a character tells us. The film then ends with the corpse of Shingen's double floating down a river. Floating with him is the banner of Shingen's kingdom – the Takeda flag – which speaks of mighty rivers, winds, fires, mountains and soil. These entropic certainties ironically counterpoint the film's frail corpses. In "The Shadow Warrior", downfalls greet all kings, clans, directors, actors and men. To think otherwise is folly. And if to behave differently is fraudulent, all men are impostors.
"The Shadow Warrior" is the first Kurosawa film that might be termed "Brechtian". The sentimentality and more populist aspects of Kurosawa's previous works are replaced with a distant, dispassionate tone, and most sequences are filmed with stagnant medium and long-shots. Elsewhere metaphysics takes precedent over motion, Kurosawa asks us to examine and ponder the subtleties of each scene, and all characters are held at distance, such that they become faintly absurd. Kurosawa would resurrect this style for his 1985 masterpiece, "Ran", an epic to which "The Shadow Warrior" is often unfairly compared. "The Shadow Warrior" may be flawed – it becomes repetitive, its bloodbaths are oft cheesy rather than profound, and filming in modern Japan forces Kurosawa to rely on claustrophobic exterior shots which hamper the philosophical scope of his picture – but it is nevertheless peppered with many masterful moments. Famously, the film was executive produced by George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, who convinced 20th Century Fox to make up the shortfall when the film's original produces, Toho Studios, proved unable to afford the film's completion.
8/10 – Worth multiple viewings. See "Ran", "Barry Lyndon" and "The Red and the White".