By Mark Schilling
It's now official: the Japanese period drama, nearly dead a decade ago, has penetrated not
only the mainstream -- where it never really left -- but the farthest reaches of arthouse
auteurdom. Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose naturalistic examinations of loss and redemption
in such films as Maborosi, After Life, Distance and Nobody Knows have made him a
leader of Japan's New Wave, has finally put on his directorial topknot. His next project,
he has told Screen International, will be a period drama he started scripting during the
year-long shoot of Nobody Knows. Scheduled to go into production next spring, the film,
Kore-eda says, will be "like Kurosawa's Lower Depths" in focusing on the poor of the
feudal era rather than their samurai masters.
Interest in the genre -- a staple during the Japanese film industry's postwar Golden Era --
has been growing among the auteur class for some time now. Sogo Ishii, an indie pioneer
who examined Japan's social and psychic fringes in such films as Crazy Thunder Road,
The Crazy Family and Angel Dust, retold the story of the legendary fighting monk Benkei
in the 2000 Gojoe -- but for all its hyper-kinetic swordplay scenes, the film was too far
ahead of the box office curve.
More successful was Takeshi Kitano's 2003 reworking of the 1962 Kenji Misumi classic
Zatoichi, which grossed 2.45 billion ($22 million), making it Kitano's first big
commercial hit after a long string of auteurist films with outlaw heroes. By this time the
audience was ready for Kitano's mix of realistic blood-letting, produced by CG
unavailable to Kurosawa, and a tap dance finale straight from a Broadway review.
Though arguably more of a populist filmmaker than an auteur, Yoji Yamada had never
attempted the samurai genre in an acclaimed four-decade career before he made The
Twilight Samurai in 2002 -- and scored his first hit since ending his 48-installment
Tora-san series in 1996, not to mention his first-ever Oscar nomination. This October
Yamada will release another film with a samurai hero: The Secret Sword -- The Devil's
Fingernail.
But the thoroughly contemporary Kore-eda? It's a bit like Mike Leigh going medieval.
The results will be eagerly awaited, nonetheless and, like all the films mentioned above,
no doubt quite salable abroad.
