Sanjuro

There is no more surprising film about education and its discontents than Akira Kurosawa’s 1962 Sanjuro. Ostensibly a picaresque samurai picture, Sanjuro is actually about an extended colloquium conducted between a group of eager young samurai and Toshiro Mifune’s scruffy man-with-no name (Sanjuro means “thirty-something”; in this film, Mifune’s swordsman, who is loath to give his real name, if he has one, names himself after a flower – Carnations Thirty-Something; this repeats a joke from Kurosawa’s previous comedy-action film, Yojimbo, featuring the same character.) The nine young samurai, all dressed identically, with shaved heads and a vaguely rodent-like appearance are somehow caught-up in a conspiracy pitting the Shogun’s chamberlain against his superintendant. The conspiracy is a MacGuffin, a plot device that is never really developed, designed to allow Kurosawa to stage a series of confrontations and sword battles of increasing ferocity. Kurosawa was the most tyrannical of directors and his iron-hand is particularly evident in the highly formal mise-en-scene – the movie is shaped as a series of colloquia between the nine identical baby-samurai and Mifune’s cynical, if patient, warrior-mentor. Why exactly Mifune’s character risks his life and prestige to educate his comically inept disciples is left unclear – presumably, the film references Kurosawa’s role as the uber-warrior director in Japanese cinema in the early sixties and his relationship with the nouvelle vague as it developed in that country during that decade. Kurosawa seems to want to dramatize the proposition that he remains the master of Japanese cinema but is willing to pass along a few tips to his eager-beaver apostles and would-be competitors. In this respect, there is something almost oppressive and claustrophobic about the movie’s design which features elaborate compositions demonstrating on the wide-screen contrast between Sanjuro and the young men who slavishly follow him. Many of Kurosawa’s films are overlong. Sanjuro is less than two hours, efficiently made, but still sufficiently digressive to incorporate many elements broader, and more profound, than the standard slash-and-hack of a Japanese chambara (sword-play) picture. For instance, he pauses the action to dwell on the heroism of a serving girl – as she returns to the besieged palace on a mission, Sanjuro casually says: “Now, there’s a real samurai for you.” In one scene, Mifune peeps around a bale of hay as court-ladies who have never been in a barn before luxuriate on a bed straw. The film’s tone is broadly comical, but part of the humor is a critique of the samurai ethos which Kurosawa has come to question: a kindly elderly lady tells Mifune’s character that the “best sword is sheathed” and that “killing people is a bad habit,” advice which Sanjuro seems to take to heart, fighting many of his battles kendo-style without unsheathing his blade. The film’s critique of its own violence reaches a spectacular climax in the final duel between Sanjuro and the leader of the bad guys, a nightmarishly disciplined swordsman with facial features as eerily taut as Jack Palance. The showdown ends in a display of violence that is still alarming and startling to this day, an image that implicitly undercuts all the merry action preceding that duel. Ultimately, Sanjuro’s catechism is that the skills that he teaches his young students are not worth having and that, perhaps, the best and bravest samurai is no samurai at all. Kurosawa seems to have regarded Sanjuro as a commercial effort and a throw-away, but the film is extremely entertaining and, because of its efficiency and rather single-minded design, one of his most impressive pictures.