Murashige, though hardly a mental slouch, is stymied by these events, and with each new case he winds up turning to Kanbei’s superior tactical mind for help. The prisoner thus becomes the detective, albeit with shackles and a straw mat in lieu of an armchair, and Suda, the star of Kurosawa’s gripping recent thriller “Cloud,” inflects his otherwise cool, clammy performance with wild flickers of genius and menace. Kanbei isn’t exactly Hannibal Lecter, and Murashige, whom Motoki lends immense stature, wisdom, and gravity, is no one’s idea of Clarice Starling. But Kurosawa, who came to international prominence in the late nineteen-nineties with the brilliantly unnerving serial-killer film “Cure,” nonetheless finds a sneaky “Silence of the Lambs”-adjacent pleasure in his characters’ deductive rapport. Yonezawa’s novel gives him the chance to splice his procedural DNA into the unlikely host cell of the historical drama—the first historical drama, as it happens, that he has ever directed.
Did Kurosawa, who has made dozens of features in the past four decades, steer clear of Japan’s feudal era until now so as to avoid comparisons with his more famous namesake—the one who directed such samurai classics as “Throne of Blood,” “Yojimbo,” “The Hidden Fortress,” and, of course, “Seven Samurai”? It’s more likely, I think, that the younger Kurosawa was simply waiting for the ideal vehicle to come along, one that would allow him to slyly turn some of the conventions of the war picture inside out. Battlefield carnage is kept to a minimum, and the action unfolds, with almost perverse austerity, in private rooms, enclosed courtyards, and one dimly lit dungeon. Yonezawa’s novel allows Kurosawa to do what he has always done best: track down killers, investigate lovingly detailed crime scenes, and apply the mechanics of murder plots toward gravely existential ends.
In “Cure,” a hellish riff on Agatha Christie’s “Curtain,” Kurosawa concocted a gloomy tour de force of social alienation and spiritual dread, using a series of inexplicable killings to suggest a terrifying void in the fabric of modern life. “The Samurai and the Prisoner” may be set centuries earlier, but it’s a Kurosawa movie through and through. The talk is grave, the editing unhurried; the camera holds multiple characters in the frame and watches them from a sedate remove. The murders and their ensuing investigations have a genuine philosophical density, and Kurosawa uses them to interrogate the mores of the era: the implications of the samurai code, the horrors of war, the nature of individual will, the meaning of courage, and, perhaps most of all, the uses and abuses of religion.
Divine punishment can make for great spectacle, and spectacle, the film argues, can easily become an instrument of mass manipulation and mind control. One of its animating tensions is a clash between old traditions and beliefs and recent encroachments, including Christianity. (The first Jesuit missionary in Japan arrived in 1549.) This conflict erupts into the open when a local Christian church suddenly goes up in flames. The implications of this struggle seem to weigh with particular heaviness on Murashige’s wife, Chiyoho (Yuriko Yoshitaka), a devout Buddhist, who, in one mesmerizing sequence, deconstructs an oft-repeated aphorism: “Advance to Paradise, retreat to Hell.” What this means is open to interpretation, but it is wielded here primarily as a slogan of battlefield aggression—a rallying cry for soldiers who have been trained to abandon their fears, push bravely onward, and embrace a glorious death.
Murashige, who has killed many men in battle, no longer has much use for that glory. Among warlords, he has become an unfashionable pacifist, and his refusal to bend the knee to Oda, or to execute enemies in accordance with the samurai code of honor, springs from a profound moral conviction—a belief in a future liberated from the excesses of martial violence. In one gorgeously observed sequence, the film pauses in its torrents of verbiage, while Murashige serves tea to one of his men. The silent respite might seem inconsequential, but, in its focussed display of tenderness and beauty, it feels more like a dramatic culmination, a declaration of principles, a glimpse of a world that’s genuinely worth fighting for. Throughout, “The Samurai and the Prisoner” is fascinated by the significance of the seemingly insignificant. It’s limited to a tense interlude, a blip in the history of a large-scale conflict. But a blip can contain multitudes, and this one allows Murashige to question every aspect of the social order that has shaped him. The answers, he suspects, may well hold the key to his nation’s future. ♦
