Good

Rating: 8/10 (13 September 2008)

Watching Akira Kurosawa's three hour long epic color film (his third) from 1980, Kagumusha (The Shadow Warrior) reminded me of the historical plays of William Shakespeare. While more famed for adapting the dramas of Shakespeare (Ran from King Lear, The Bad Sleep Well from Hamlet, The Hidden Fortress from Macbeth), Kurosawa's long film reminds me more of the detailed histories, where a single character is less important than the whole milieu (as well as being a more epic version of the old The Prince And The Pauper fable). And he succeeds very well at it. While the overall film is a bit too slow paced to be considered great, there is no doubt that it is an intricate work that abounds with astonishing color imagery, and is suffused in details that the screenplay by Kurosawa and Masato Ide slip in very subtly.
The best example of this is that even though the average viewer will know next to nothing of Japanese feudal history (what little I knew came from mostly old Japanese films), specific details are not needed because the themes and characterizations are so universal. It won the Palm D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and was seen as a comeback film for Kurosawa, after a mostly forgettable decade (the 1970s) of sporadic film work.
The actual story of the film is rather simple, the feudal lord of a clan that hopes to unite Japan in 1573, Shingen Takeda (Tatsuya Nakadai), is assassinated by a rival clan. However, since this takes place at night, the wounded lord has his generals prepare a double to take his place, should he die, and orders them to keep up the pretense for three years. We never see the actual shot, only hear it, and then see it in a re-enactment for the warlord, Ieyasu Tokugawa (Masayuki Yui), who ordered the assassination. The double is a thief, Kagemusha, played by the same actor, who during the opening six minutes of the film, before the credits, mocks the feudal lord and his brother as hypocrites for condemning him, a petty thief. He says they are mass murderers. The lord spares his doppelganger, the first of a number of fortuities in this story, loosely based upon real events. Nakadai is splendid in both roles. Usually, such dual roles are phoned in, but one can sense the difference in the two characters, even long after Shingen is dead.All in all, Kagemusha is a very good film, with some great scenes and moments. Unfortunately, its plot drags weigh it down just enough that it falls below some of his true masterpieces, like Seven Samurai, Ikiru, and The Bad Sleep Well. Yet, even if it is not Kurosawa at his best, like Shakespeare in second rate mode, it is still far superior to all but the very best of lesser filmmakers. Yet, in Kagemusha, as in few other films of quality, it is the very lack of specificity about its people and events- where such details float behind the presentation, throughout the film, then swiftly come together to make sense late in the work, that allows it to have such a lasting impact, narratively, just as its switch between surrealistic color sets and realistic location shots similarly recapitulates the viewers' disorientation, then realization that something very interesting and different has happened. That simply does not happen in Hollywood films, and rarely occurs in any films, at all. It also shows why critics such as Stephen Prince often do a disservice to the viewers in their commentaries on films, and miss the very elements that make a film work or not. Fortunately, such defects do not affect the great artists whose works are disserviced by such lesser minds.