Film as art.  A novel concept indeed.  It is a concept that has become so foreign to me that I no longer enter the viewing of a film expecting to be enlightened or elevated in anyway, but only with the desire to hopefully be entertained for a couple of hours.   But art is what we have stumbled upon with Yoji Yamada’s brilliant tome ‘The Twilight Samurai’.  A word of warning however.  If you approach this film expecting to see ‘The Five Deadly Venoms’ or ‘Iron Monkey’ you will be sorely disappointed.

In one of the best performances I’ve seen in a while, Hiroyuki Sanada (from the Last Samurai) is Seibie Iguchi, a low ranked 50 koku samurai.  To illustrate how low a 50 koku samurai is, if the Samurai were a corporate entity like McDonalds, a 1200 koku Samurai would be one of the corporate lawyers and a 50 koku samurai would be on fries.  As this is late 19th century Japan, the Samurai feudal system is nearing its inevitable end, as many samurai, including Iguchi, perform duties as lowly office workers, keeping track of inventory and tabulating numbers in columns.  Iguchi has earned the nickname ‘Twilight’ from his coworkers because as the workday ends and the sun goes down, he doesn’t join them at the drinking houses or Geisha houses, but just goes home to care for his recently motherless daughters and dementia affected mother.

The tale of the Twilight Samurai and his 10 year old Daughter Kayana is narrated, as an aged adult, by the youngest daughter, Ito, age five at the time of the story.  She describes her father as an honorable man, but also a conflicted one.  He urges his daughters to concentrate on their book learning, as opposed to sewing, hoping the oppressive views of Japanese women will change by the time they reach adulthood.

But when forced to act as a samurai, no matter how distasteful he my find the deed, he dutifully complies.  As in the situation when he was forced to defend a recently divorced childhood sweetheart (Rie Miyazawa) from her abusive husband, a feared swordsman.  The abusive husband lays down a challenge that Iguchi desperately attempts to avoid, but with no way out, Iguchi meets the man at the river for duel.  Thing is, Iguchi only comes with a stick along with his sheathed sword.  We will find out later on Iguchi’s reluctance to draw his sword.  Iguchi easily bests the man, stick against sword, to the shock of his friends and colleagues.  Unfortunately for Iguchi, once his skill and prowess is learned by superiors the simple life he so cherishes is all but shattered.

There are total of two sword fighting scenes in the Twilight Samurai and both of those were relatively brief.  But the film was so rich and had so much history, and the care that was obviously involved in delivering that history to us, as westerners, in a way that was clear to understand was astounding.  As the reluctant samurai, Iguchi is ordered to kill a rouge samurai who refuses to commit hari-kari as putting a whole in his belly has ceased to make sense to him.  Kind of with dude there.  Trapped into a system that he despises, but equally trapped by his honor to this very system, Iguchi approaches the rouge samurai and then engage in one of the best film conversations I’ve hrard, also heightened by the imminent danger of the situation.  Outstanding.

I can’t heap enough praise on this film.  Though it takes place 150 years ago in Japan, what middle manager in Des Moines can’t relate to being yoked to a job you hate, surrounded be people you don’t like, but forced to do it to feed your kids.  Again,  this not a film for action junkies, but true lovers of cinema as art, rejoice.