CineScene--By and For Movie Lovers

Hidden Blade
by Chris Knipp

brick_poster Munezo Kitagiri (Masatoshi Nagase) is another of Yôji Yamada’s twilight samurais, a sad-faced, much of the time useless, man. When he finds happiness at the end, it’s through a kind of lonely exile. It’s only when Hidden Blade (Kakushi-ken oni no tsume) is two-thirds over that there’s some serious swordplay; but like a dish served after a long fast, this death struggle, even though it’s aborted, feels delicious.

Kitagiri lives in the shadow of his father’s disgrace, and creates his own disgrace when he steals a married woman of peasant origins from her husband. The pretty young Kie (Takao Matsu) once worked in his mother’s household, and (this is a soft-hearted tale) Kie and Kitagiri have always been sweet on each other. When he finds out several years later that she’s not only unhappy with her merchant husband but now ill and left to waste away in her bed there by her wicked stepmother, Kitagiri simply puts Kie on his back and takes her home. Kie returns to health and thrives in her old surroundings – and the merchant family lodges no protest -- but as a samurai Kitagiri can’t really marry Kie and so must reluctantly order her to return to her parents.

Kitagiri can’t seem to get anything right. His uncle criticizes him for capitulating to modern ways because his clan is being clumsily trained to use rifles and canons – scenes of which we see periodically.

In the opening scene we’ve seen Kitagiri and his close friend Samon Shimada (Hidetaka Yoshioka) bid farewell to Yaichiro Hazama (Yukiyoshi Ozawa), a fellow samurai who’s been posted to Edo. Shimada’s wedding is an occasion for elders to criticize Kitagiri, and also a sign that Kitagiri is falling behind by not marrying himself. Both Shimada and Kitagiri are “backwater samurai” as the somewhat prissy sensei sent to train their clan gunsmanship puts it, while Hazama in contrast exemplifies sophistication and success, and he’s a true samurai, the best swordsman of his clan. The training in marching and rifles is occasion for much buffoonery. Hidden Blade modulates delicately from romance to comedy to solemn drama to adventure story, and back again.

Fortunes can shift rapidly in the feudal world and at the end of the story the successful, much favored Hazama – though he has a beautiful, elegant wife (Reiko Takashima) prepared to do anything for him – has led a rebellion against the Shogunate and thereby become an escaped criminal, and the chief retainer, Shogen Hori (Ken Ogata), orders Kitagiri to perform his final, no-win battle: to challenge Hazama to a swordfight which he cannot lose.

If Kitagiri wins the battle he will be killing an old friend. If he loses, he will have failed his clan and added more disgrace to his name.

Hazama’s wife comes to Kitagiri the night before and begs him to let Hazama escape into the mountains; and when Kitagiri can’t agree to that, she promises to appeal to the chief retainer.

I don’t think as some do that this is less effective than Twilight Samurai. It may move along in fits and starts but it lacks the latter's longeurs. Hidden Blade's final swordfight isn’t as elaborate or excruciating and suspenseful as Twilight Samurai's, but it has the virtue of not being so drawn out. It seems odd that Kitagiri ends up seeking revenge against his chief retainer, even though the man has undoubtedly done something highly improper. Sensibly, he renounces his samurai status. The ending is quite sentimental, but one can’t fault the movie for being sweet. A samurai would never do what Kitagiri does at the end, but he is no longer a samurai.

Yamada has his limitations, but he's also found ways of breathing life back into the samurai genre; he's not so much rehabilitated it as reconceived it, by seeing the samurai in more specific social and historical terms. Nagase as Kitagiri has a kind of asceetic antihero nobility and Ozawa as Hazama looks as dashing as Johnny Depp in his pirate mode, but with staring eyes and matted hair instead of a grin and eyeliner. Hazama is magnificent, almost like a Japanese folklore demon; and when he gets his hand blown off, it's obvious the modern age has come to destroy our heroes and upstage our villains.