Samurai Spy (1965, Masahiro Shinoda) (Patreon)

41/100

First review of the new year (though this was actually the last film I watched in 2022) seems like an apt time to remind y'all that my ratings, for all that the needlessly precise 100-point system comes across as striving to be definitive, aren't meant to reflect any even quasi-objective measure of "good" or "bad"—merely my own personal level of enthusiasm. For example: I did not much enjoy Samurai Spy for the very simple reason that I could make neither heads nor tails of what the hell was going on, a serious liability given how plot-heavy the film is. Here's an entirely representative sample of its English-subtitled dialogue: 

"Your Sanada party is very active. Now Kakei is on the way to Hachioji from Kawagoe. Nezu is going to Edo. You are now on the Shinano road. If you go to Nakatsugawa, you are to meet Anayama. If you go to Seba, you see Saizo Kiragakure. Right?"

Having now transcribed that, I have a clearer sense of its meaning. "Y'all are so predictable that I know where every member of the clan is headed, including you since there are only two possible options on this particular road." In the moment, however, all of those Japanese place and character names are quite hard to process, especially since we haven't yet encountered any of the people mentioned (and will never meet some of them, I believe). Saizo Kiragakure shows up to save our hero at the movie's finale, in a very deus ex machina kind of way, and I still had not a clue who he was or what his narrative significance was supposed to be. Nor have I chosen an isolated instance—roughly 70% of Samurai Spy consists of expository conversations that assume a viewer's knowledge of 17th-century Japanese history. It's not the film's fault that a line like "Tatewaki betrayed Tokugawa and wants to be a Toyotomi man" looks to me like only one short step up from "관 옆 betrayed 도쿠가와 and wants to be a 도요토미 man," in the sense that there's no way I'm gonna be able to keep straight which of those words is the individual and which is which rival clan. Not without compiling and constantly consulting a detailed legend, anyway. Again, wouldn't be so much of a problem were this primarily a visual feast—I adore Shinoda's formally magnificent Double Suicide—but it's closer in spirit to something like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, maintaining a steely flatness. And while swords get unsheathed a few times, even that's handled oddly. At one point, the protagonist and his nemesis (I think) just sort of wander away from a pitched battle in progress and have a discussion, ignored, as if they were invisible, by 20 dudes clanking blades literally like 10 yards away. In any case, I got so little purchase on this that I spent a lot of the second half pondering the code-related possibilities offered by logographic written languages (prompted by a code in the film that seems to involve the use of a rhombus in one Chinese character). Oh, and one guy gets fantastic dying words: "You are an odd person. You really are."