The Pawn who impersonated the Mountain...

Rating: 9/10 (15 January 2019)

As a symbol, people are willing to sacrifice their lives for him, he's the Lord, the mountain, the Supreme Leader but as himself, he's nothing but a commoner, a pawn, a property the Lord's advisers can dispose of anytime. He's the Kagemusha, the Shadow Warrior, the pawn who impersonated the mountain.
And only Akira Kurosawa, the director who can literally move mountains could make such a magnificent-looking and once again thought-provoking film, his only Golden Palm winner; the story of a thief impersonating a lord, a lord so cautious about the eventual demise of the Takeda clan that he demanded his death to be hidden for three years, it is more dangerous to waste a death than a life precisely because life is valuable, his is too valuable to be exposed.
"Kagemusha" is Kurosawa back to his Samurai roots, that forged his international legacy. Only this time, the use of colors and a four-decade experience provide a whole new experience, foreshadowing "Ran", another masterpiece with a no less bright palettes of colors and shades of red. Kurosawa provide such beautiful shots of warfare in 16th century Japan that it might distract from the main story. Because a war never starts with arms but a mind set.
Lord Shingen's death might encourage the enemy to attack his unexperienced heir. This is how crucial the Kagemusha is, so vital that he escaped from crucifixion because of his uncanny resemblance to the Lord. But while a lesser director would have turned this into a gimmick, Kurosawa makes it a source of questioning for the enemy and a burden on the shoulders of every protagonist, including the Kagemusha himself played by Tatsuya Nakadai, the handsome gun-owner from "Yojimbo".
The actor plays both the double and the original and in both cases, he finds the perfect note. As Shingen Takeda he doesn't give an exceptional performance but provides the perspective enabling us to judge how authentic the double is in the following scenes, the point isn't to judge the actor's acting but his acting as an actor and in the most thrilling moments as himself, and sometimes being himself makes him realer than his own model.
These scenes work because the film makes his impersonation problematic from the start, will he convince his men? His crew? His grandson? His concubines? His generals? His army? His horse? And with the meticulous patience, Kurosawa turns each interaction into a heart-pounding moment where we can contemplate the nervousness of the double and spot the sign of nervousness that slips through his austere façade. It's like watching a Cassavetes movie, you fear the improvisation but you know it's inevitable.

It's all in the eyes, one glimpse on Kagemusha's face and we can read every single thought "what do I do now?" "was I good?", every time he's looking for some encouragement, compliment, he tries, sometimes tries too hard, sometimes pushes his luck, and we wonder how far is he going to get? What we have is a war epic where thrills are mainly contained in these quiet scenes. Never have been things as banal as encounters and conversations so intense.
This is not to diminish the epic value of the fighting sequences, which are as beautifully directed, designed and choreographed as one would expect from Kurosawa. But they almost play like aesthetic interludes or at least that's how I appreciated them because maybe I couldn't tell which side was fighting. But I could appreciate them in their intimate moments, seen from the viewer's position. Kagemusha doesn't fight but he sees soldiers dying for him or at least the man he impersonates. He contemplates the piles of corpses that were defending him and something tilts in his mind.
Ever since "Rashomon" and then "Yojimbo", the viewer's position was crucial to a story. One would always watch before acting or understanding, there's no such thing as passiveness with Kurosawa's characters and maybe there lies the essence of Asian cinema where even in misleading quietness are sowed the seeds of action. Kagemusha isn't just a character study but a study of a character studying another into a spellbinding "mise en abyme", the more Kagemusha understands Shingen, the better he values his responsibility as a Kagemusha, it's an existential epiphany.
What an irony that in reality, he's disrespected and is immediately disregarded once he fulfilled his purpose. He's a pawn that can be moved, even destroyed, with no regards whatsoever for his accomplishment. The Shingen is called a Mountain and his motto was the status quo, a mountain doesn't move. What an irony that a pawn is impersonating a mountain, and the ending shows that nothing is immovable, no one can stay static forever but it's precisely for his desire to get off his father's shadow and move that the Takeda heir will accelerate the downfall.
Not to spoil the ending, I would say that it does close the arc of the Kagemusha in the most powerful way, one that makes the war and the character study converge into a point of existential meaningfulness only to be swept off by the march of history and that even mountains can move, they move slowly yet they move. Whatever the Kagemusha did to provide the haunting final shot is to give a meaning to his life and to his own death, which is after all what his master did. A Kagemuha till the end. And the greatest lesson which is that you can find a meaning to your life in the shadow of another. And Kurosawa's legacy proves it as well.
Indeed, if there will never be any director to equal Kurosawa in talent or historical significance, a Kagemusha director so to speak, I guess living in his shadow would be enough an honor. Think of "Star Wars", "Pulp Fiction", "The Magnificent Seven" or Leone's Westerns, they're all classics... that live in the shadow of "The Hidden Fortress", "Rashomon", "Seven Samurai" or "Yojinbo".