I consider myself a person with a fairly large and flexible vocabulary, but I have to admit that if I'm pressed to explain the nuanced difference between "revenge" and "vengeance," I'd be stumped, without taking the time to look it up. Nor do I expect that I will be able to articulate from memory, a few weeks or even days from now, the significant variations that distinguish Zatoichi's Revenge (#10 in the series) from Zatoichi's Vengeance (#13, the exact midpoint of the 25 film saga of Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman that Criterion released in the fall of 2013.) Maybe if I was more discerning in regard to the subtle details of these episodes, or sufficiently concerned with holding the creative talents responsible for the films to a higher standard of ingenuity, this sense of sameness would be a problem for me, but as I said nearly a year ago in my review of Zatoichi's Revenge, these movies are more like comfort foods to me, a cinematic snack that offers up enough spice to keep things interesting, while delivering the familiar satisfactions that more than make up for the relative lack of novelty. And after a couple of weeks grappling with seriously hefty and substantial offerings of Japanese cinema, ranging from the brutally dark Sword of Doom, the bleakness of Shohei Imamura's The Pornographers to the deliriously flashy neon pop of Tokyo Drifter, along with a sustained exploration of melodramatic propaganda films of the early 1940s in the new Kinoshita and World War II Eclipse Series box and culminating with the abysmal plunge into Yukio Mishima's Patriotism ... well, the timing couldn't be better for me to just relax a little and ease into Zatoichi's well-established groove, delivered at the height of the series' popularity in the early months of 1966.
I can't really come up with a good reason as to why this particular film was given the title Zatoichi's Vengeance, other than it sounds kind of badass and predictable. The story itself has all the trappings of a cautiously managed formulaic strategy, with a synopsis that could be applied to quite a few other installments of the franchise: our beloved blind sword-wielding masseuse ambles into an intrigue involving a highway robbery victim whose dying words connect him and direct him to a village just down the road. Once he arrives and ingratiates himself to the inevitably hard-pressed honest folks who find themselves oppressed by a ruthless gang of greedy criminal miscreants, Zatoichi has no choice but to get involved for the sake of defending the vulnerable and achieving justice. And if he can pull off a few incredible stunts and sword tricks while ridding the world of a couple dozen villainous creeps, so much the better. And you can count on him to do just that. So tonight, my main objective in this review is to simply tick off a few of the more interesting markers that stood out to me after watching Zatoichi's Vengeance earlier in the evening.
- a blind biwa-playing priest who never actually pulls out his instrument to make music, but still challenges Zatoichi's employment of deadly violence as the default solution to the predicaments he finds himself in, infusing a tone of philosophical tension into the mix
- some nice but subtle set pieces of rustic Japanese village life, with a host of extras in various period costumes strolling around in the background to lend some vibrancy in several early establishing scenes
- two sequences involving the "thunder drums," which provide a good excuse to crank up the volume - the booming percussion plays havoc with Zatoichi's highly sensitive hearing in the first scene, causing him to flee the situation and giving his adversaries a tactic to use when they ambush him on a bridge, a wonderfully choreographed sword battle filmed mostly in stark silhouette against a twilight sky
- an entertaining but shamelessly derivative sliced-candle stunt that's recycled from Episode #7, Zatoichi's Flashing Sword
- the protagonist gets a little more bloodied-up than we're used to seeing as he refrains from a lethal response longer than he ordinarily would because he doesn't want to corrupt a tag-along kid who's watching every move that his idol makes
- Best of all, Kei Sato as the lead villain. Sato is a ubiquitous presence in so many 1960s Japanese films, and a welcome one at that. He's a fine foil, with a stage presence solidly capable of holding our attention as he tries to bully Zatoichi and barks orders to his men
Like I said, nothing terribly deep or all that memorable, but it definitely hit the spot tonight. Now I'm ready to move on to the roots of the New German Cinema.
Next: Young Torless