Kagemusha

A couple of years back, FXM had the Akira Kurosawa movie Kagemusha in the rotation. I recorded it, but never got around to doing a review on it before Dad and I moved and I had to get rid of the old DVR. Recently, FXM put it back in the schedule and I recorded it again. Since FXM runs most of their movies in the rotation a lot, it's getting a couple more airings in quick succession, with the first of those being tomorrow (Oct. 21) at 12:20 PM.

Kagemusha is set in a period of Japanese history I didn't know much about. I had heard about the Tokugawa era, a long era of peace and isolation from the early 1600s until the US Navy forcibly opened up the country in the 1850s (you may recall the movie The Barbarian and the Geisha set in the 1850s). Before that was a period of warlords and clan warfare. Takeda Shingen (Takeda is the surname) is the head of one of those clans; his brother Nobukado recently found a thief who was supposed to be put to death but who Nobukado realized bore an uncanny resemblance to Shingen, leading to Nobukado sparing him. This could somehow be useful.

Sure enough, it does become useful. Shingen goes off to war, besieging one of Tokugawa's castles. However he gets fatally shot. (Japan had known Chinese-style firearms for a few centuries, and about 30 years prior to the action in the movie, the Portuguese had introduced western-style firearms to Japan.) Before he dies, he tells his subordinates to keep his death a secret for three years. Nobukado figures that this is where that thief who's a doppelgänger would come in quite handy. Perhaps they can have the thief impersonate Shingen, since very few people know that Shingen actually died.

It seems like a daft idea, and of course there's the question of whether the thief even wants to do it. But it's not as if he has much choice, so he agrees to it. Enough excuses are put to the powerful that they're able to go along with it without much disbelief; it often seems to be the case in real life how much crap people are willing to put up with to try to get more power in the end. The one person who disbelieves at first is Shingen's grandson. Shades of The Emperor's New Clothes.

Things get a lot harder when Nobukado marches off to war. The thief probably doesn't know much about military tactics, so in theory can just let Nobukado make all the decisions. But in the fog of war in the era when leaders actually went off to battle, things happen, and the thief is forced to take command of some of the troops. He's surprisingly successful, but this is also a pyrrhic victory as his getting high on power ultimately screws up the whole plan to keep the real Shingen's death a secret....

Kagemusha shows up on FXM because of the arrangement in funding that got the movie produced. Kurosawa was filming for Toho in Japan, but fell short of funds to finish production. So Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas stepped in, convincing 20th Century-Fox to fund the rest of the project in exchange for the international distribution, which is why you see references to the international version of the movie. Coppola and Lucas also get executive producer credits.

As for the movie, I'm sorry to say I think it's something that wouldn't have any recognition if it didn't have Kurosawa's name tied to it. The print FXM ran was 159 minutes, although I've read that other prints are from 162 minutes to a restored version of 180 minutes. And that long run time is also rather slow in developing. This is material that I think really would have worked better in miniseries format or some other form of limited-run TV series instead of one long feature film. I think that people who don't speak Japanese (that includes me) could also benefit from more exposition about the period of Japanese history in which the film is set.

For anybody who doesn't know much about Kurosawa, there are quite a few of his movies I'd introduce them to first. But for people who have seen a bunch of his movies, or people who are into Asian warlord movies, they might like to give Kagemusha a try.