BARAGAKI: UNBROKEN SAMURAI

A Rousing Look at the Shinsengumi

Venue(s): Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills: Oct. 22 - Oct. 28, 2021
Shinjuku Wald 9: Oct. 29 - Nov. 4, 2021, Visit theater site for details
Language: Japanese with English subtitles
Official website: moeyoken-movie.com/news/#english-subtitles
Theater website: hlo.tohotheater.jp/net/schedule/009/TNPI2000J01.do
Theater website: tjoy.jp/shinjuku_wald9#schedule-content


Title: 燃えよ剣 (Moeyo Ken)
Director: Masato Harada (原田眞人)
Duration: 148 min

In an already packed season of must-see cinema, the sudden announcement that Japan’s current box-office champion will begin running with English subtitles from tomorrow is still a major surprise, since previous hits by the same filmmaker never had that benefit, despite his urging. But here it is: Masato Harada’s rousing jidaigeki spectacle Baragaki: Unbroken Samurai, set in the years just before the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Run, don’t walk, to Toho Cinemas Roppongi or see it later at Shinjuku Wald 9.

Japan’s first fully bilingual, bicultural filmmaker, Harada is acclaimed for a range of compelling films that have successfully merged social criticism with world-class entertainment. He has received international attention for such titles as Kamikaze Taxi (1994), still the greatest immigrant story/yakuza thriller/buddy road movie ever made in Japan; Jubaku: Spellbound (1999), still the most exciting film ever made about a banking crisis; Chronicle of My Mother (2011), an intensely moving depiction of maternal guilt and midlife revelations as dementia erases memories, and the revisionist WWII epic The Emperor in August (2015), which won him Japan Academy Awards for both Best Screenplay and Best Director.

His latest film, which was delayed 18 months due to the Covid pandemic, follows the fortunes of the Shinsengumi special police corps (memorable from Nagisa Oshima’s 1999 Taboo) through their No. 2 man, Toshizo Hijikata (Junichi Okada). Like others in the corps, which was created in Kyoto by the Tokugawa Bakufu in the waning days of the shogunate to protect them from imperial loyalists, Hijikata was not a born samurai, but rather a fierce fighter whose style was dubbed baragaki (Japanese for thorn).

He is remembered not only for his fighting skills and devotion to the Tokugawa, but also for writing the corps’ code of conduct, which was rigid in the extreme and prohibited any deviation from the samurai code (bushido), under penalty of seppuku.

Based on “Moeyo Ken” (“Burning Sword”), a best-selling historical novel by Ryotaro Shiba, whose work Harada also adapted for his 2017 hit Sekigahara, Baragaki adopts an interesting framing device, with Hijikata recalling the group’s vicious assassinations, double-crosses and spectacular battles, to a French interlocutor in Hakodate in June 1869, where he’s been forced to retreat following the 16-hour Battle of Futamata. He would be killed a short time later during the Battle of Hakodate.

As with any Masato Harada film, this one is gorgeous, sprawling and relentlessly informative, with superlative performances (especially from Okada and Ryosuke Yamada, who plays a young acolyte), exceptional locations and breathtakingly visceral action.

Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills

 

 

Shinjuku Wald 9