Zen and the Art of Dogma Cinema
As M. was entertaining work colleagues last night, I took the opportunity to go to the movies for a film I’d wanted to see during the Sydney Film Festival: Zatoichi, the newest Takeshi Kitano offering. Takeshi is a bit of a renaissance man: acting & directing in films and television, painting, and writing. Unlike the last few of his films, this isn’t a gangster flick, but instead a samurai movie, and for the most part, much the same as other such movies, with the exceptions of its use of humor and of music: sort of Dancer in the Dark (hence the “dogma” reference) meets Kagemusha, with a bit of Rashomon thrown in. Beat Takeshi shuffles and mutters through the movie as a blind masseur (whose cane conceals a sword, with which he is adept), occasionally pausing to slice up half a dozen or more assailants. And when I say “pausing,” I mean it; he appears hardly to even move (yes, special effects) and the bad guys are thoroughly dispatched. The finale – a kind of Last Man Standing or Red Harvest scenario – is played out in alternating shots of the villagers performing an ensemble peasant Broadway tapdance and Takeshi’s cleaning up the gangsters, suggesting, I suppose, not only that life goes on, but that it does so regardless of how the struggle between good and evil plays out. The humor, all the way to the final shot of the movie, is slapstick (Takeshi worked as a comedian earlier in his career), but it all goes to proving the moral, including the last line: “Even with my eyes open, I can’t see a thing.” It’s an incredibly pretty movie, too; even the gouts of blood.