The Master Shifts to Color

Rating: 10/10 (1 July 2002)

Kurosawa is most often - and perhaps unfairly - synonymous to many people of dynamic samurai films. People think of Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, or the different but contemporary Rashomon. They think of movement, of Toshiro Mifune bursting out of the screen. And they imagine it all in black and white.
To stay focused on this is to ignore many gems in the Kurosawa crown at your peril, and it also means maintaining unreasonable expectations when exploring some of his films. Also, while previously overlooked works have been reassessed as masterpieces since (especially High and Low), Kagemusha, the master's first chambara epic in color, usually gets short-changed, viewed as best as a dress- rehearsal for Ran, his final masterpiece. It's time to rectify the situation.
Kagemusha - "The Shadow Warrior" - is the story of a lowly thief enlisted to serve as warlord Shingen Takeda's double. When Takeda is mortally wounded, his lieutenants keep it a secret and train the double to stand in his place, eventually at great emotional cost to our nameless hero.
Kurosawa's career peaked with Redbeard. Not that that was his finest film, but it marked the peak of his financial and creative powers, and the height of his popularity in Japan. It was followed by a painful decade in the half in an artistic wilderness, caused by an unhappy first foray into color filmmaking, Dodeskaden, which was rejected by critics and audiences alike. After that came Russian tone- poem Dersu Uzala. Unable to get financing for his next project, Kurosawa buried himself in painted storyboards of the great film he would never make, until Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas swept in, forcing Fox to put up funds for this project sight unseen.
The long prep time is keenly felt upon seeing the finished film. Where Seven Samurai and even Redbeard were kinetic and fluid, Kagemusha feels very designed, static and artificial, which perfectly complements the story it tells, and its themes of social rigidity and artifice. Toshiro Mifune is nowhere to be seen either, replaced by a very different presence: Tatsuya Nakadai. Kurosawa had first intended to use Katsu - famous for the Zatoichi series - but his controlled environment had no room for that comedian's freewheeling style, and old collaborator Nakadai swept in to carry the film on his able shoulders.
The result is a beautiful film to behold, less visually alluring than Ran but more touching and human. Though it has its unforgettable images - a blinding, back-lit procession of retreating soldiers; riderless horses rolling among corpses in the battlefield; a surreal dream sequence - it is the smaller moments that stand out: the double trying to convince Shingen's concubines, his tender moments with Shingen's grandson, Daisuke Ryu's surprisingly likable antagonist Nobunaga...
It is not the instantly thrilling comeback many had expected, but it is undoubtedly the work of a true master firing on all creative cylinders, and well worth watching more than once.