#8: Tasogare Seibei (2002)

In this decade, I developed my true passion for movies, my true desire to become a filmmaker. The first major movie I made with my friends was a Samurai trilogy, and through making those movies, I began to see other movies about Samurais, including Kurosawa's great Shichinin no samurai (1954). By the year 2004 I was done with the movie, but The Twilight Samurai (Tasogare Seibei) was released in theaters, and I went with a friend to go see it.

The movie is not blades flashing, or endless gore, or anything that might lend itself to what we expect a samurai film to be today. It is more in the vein of the Kurosawa works of the 50s and 60s, and is a terrific, lyrical masterpiece of loneliness in 19th-century Japan. Hiroyuki Sanada plays Seibei, the samurai of the original title, whose wife has recently died, forcing him to spend his days raising his children. When the woman of his dreams divorces her husband, Seibei takes up the mantle of challenging him.

The movie is a prime example of doing very little with a lot, and is mostly a quiet film, punctuated by brief scenes of violence. There are two sword fights in the whole movie, and one lasts for maybe ten seconds. The movie isn't about the actions of the samurai, it is about how the man lives his life day to day. We are shown his family life, shown what he does to survive, and his resolve at picking up the sword again until he needs to. The movie also doesn't bury itself in mumbo jumbo about honor, the samurai's code, or any of that other stuff. It is simply the character, and what he deems is right.

This movie made a strong connection with me when I first saw it, and continues to resonant with me to this very day. It, along with Kurosawa's samurai films, take me back to the days when I was discovering my love for movies, and how I ate up every moment of those films. Twilight Samurai is a criminally underseen film, but I also enjoy that aspect of it. The few of us that have seen it can marvel in its glory and wonder. This movie was, more or less, my induction into Art House cinema.