#16
Post
by therewillbeblus » Fri Dec 18, 2020 2:39 pm
I didn't vote for this either, but that's because I find it to be a tough film to write about. Even after another viewing today, in an effort to have something more substantial to say, I'm most taken with the playful flexibility of genre and tone to achieve the feeling of the ultimate revenge epic within a normal-length story. Stylistically, this film blends the objective theatrical artifice with intense intimate suspense, often in the same scene (like the pitch-black night fights that are presented as staged but also acutely high-stakes in practically threatening the audience with a violent boundary-less tightening of space, trees and an absence of light clouding our mastery and confidences). The constant disruptions from subjectivity to glance into flashbacks or float to other characters or setpieces hardly color in the narrative so much as they resemble the continual psychological ghosts in memory and personalized narrative fragmentation that haunt our hero and mimic his brokenness. As new characters appear, we are less invested in their introductions, but (at least I) have a knee-jerk reaction to isolate away from these signifiers of an epic, fighting the sprawling eclectic melting pot of details this film forces on us and its hero when all he wants is to narrow his focus against a one-note aim, yet the world's extravagance won't let him off free.
Simultaneously the title makes it explicitly clear that this revenge is in relationship not only with Yukitarō the boy who lost his parents, but with his identity as an actor, a role adopted and lived in (historically accurate as well) on and off screen as a separate gender. The film is about his identity being formed and hardened as a vehicle for revenge and for self-expression, and executes both in sync with one another. The logical trajectory will mean that the completion of the revenge will signal a death of this identity, his existential loop closed as the sole purpose and meaning are fulfilled. It's interesting that he must don a costume to take on this lifelong task, insinuating that either the previous child's identity died with his parents, or that he needed to become another being to separate the complex morality of his 'self' into a creative outlet that can be allowed a single dimension. The acting also resembles the nature of Yukitarō's sly manipulations on his victims, playing them with flamboyant bait and passive aggressive info-drops to set traps with a smiling face, or wooing a woman authentically and inauthentically at once under the guise of full commitment, rationalizing it as a role in which he is fully committed to playing.
The actual forward-momentum narrative entertainment plays out like a great epic of deceit, with meditations on ethics and sharp editing that abrasively floods our visual schemas with information in claustrophobic quarters. In this regard, the film plays as an anti-epic, cornering us in small stages of space without clear parameters, so when we pan out to see a character spying or deviate to other side-convos, the sirens of alert are jarring and serve to threaten any clarity in the path in front of us of an easy revenge, that may have been less anxiety-provoking with open landscapes and deliberately paced expected encounters of most traditional epics. The melodrama is always there though, and all the comedy, action, and suspense orbit around it. There is a revenge scene midway through the film that feels straight out of a horror movie, and remains my favorite in the entire film- when he shifts his role to play one of a ghost and attempts to convince one of his victims to hang themself. It's just a beautiful and surreal depiction of emotional catharsis via psychological violence, so loud and boldly framed by Ichikawa that it's frightening as if too intense for the bounds of this world, or this medium.
