The blond swordsman
Zatoichi: Takeshi Kitano's comedy of a thousand cuts.

By Chuck Stephens

THOUGH I CAN scarcely claim to have a thorough working knowledge of internationally celebrated cine-auteur "Beat" Takeshi Kitano's long and voluminous career in Japanese TV – where he has reigned the airwaves as a scabrous talk show anchor and variety-review master of ceremonies for nearly two decades, with as many as seven shows in weekly rotation at one time – the little I have seen has proved sufficient to plant one seed of suspicion deeply enough to take permanent root. Never mind the yakuza ultraviolence and post-Kurosawa pretentiousness that constitute the aesthetic poles of Kitano's cinema, or the exuberant bloodletting of the writer-director-star's latest film, The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi, an ecstatic intervention in the long-running film and TV adventures of Japan's favorite blind swordsman. I now stand firmly convinced that this consummate entertainer's impressarial alter ego might very well be none other than Carol Burnett.

Think that's a strange assertion? Then how about this one: it took a film by Nagisa Oshima – the radical boy-king of the 1960s Japanese new wave who, for a period during the 1980s, reinvented himself for a long-running stint as a host of TV talk shows about contemporary women's issues – to finally drive home the "Beat"-Burnett connection for me.

Kitano has, of course, starred in two Oshima films – 1983's Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence and 1999's Taboo (Gohatto) – but it was the closely vested and often near-subliminal comedy of the latter film that fused these two apparently apposite performers forever as one in my thoughts. Despite its general serious-mindedness, Taboo's extraordinary meditation on male desire and narrative meltdown nevertheless contain numerous scenes wherein Kitano – playing a rather fearsome general who doubles as the film's guiding conscience – seems just on the verge of dissolving into laughter at precisely the moments he's meant to be scowling at his costars. As anyone who grew up on a steady diet of The Carol Burnett Show might have recognized, such temptations toward inappropriately demolishing the ostensible intent of a given dramatic moment were one of the show's performative mainstays. Time and again, costars Harvey Korman and Tim Conway would go ham-to-ham with one another during a tepid send-up or straight-faced bit of satire, only to surrender themselves to chaos as their scowls began to melt into trembling sneers, shatter into seismic smirks, and finally collapse into all-out hilarity, destroying any potential narrative momentum that might have accrued, even as they managed to double the audience's in-on-the-gag sense of delight.

Famously incarnated by the late Shintaro Katsu in 26 films and more than 100 TV episodes since the early 1960s, Zatoichi is a blind and wandering masseur whose sightlessness in no way impairs his deadly accuracy with a samurai sword. Part Robin Hood, part one-man Seven Samurai – and one-time on-screen nemesis for both Toshiro Mifune's Yojimbo and Hong Kong's amputee-action hero, the One-Armed Swordsman – Katsu's perpetually scowling hero enjoyed such pinpoint accuracy with a blade that he must have seemed an inevitable target for an eventual Kitano lampoon. Sure enough, one of the few clips of Kitano TV I've seen recently was a 10-year-old, two-minute, and utterly throw-away Zatoichi send-up in which, rather than slicing through his enemies, the comedian's televised Zato-incarnation manages to carelessly and cluelessly carve up the very innocents he's meant to protect. And just like Korman and Conway, Kitano can't resist cracking a mile-wide grin throughout the skit, so well-known was the spoof's subject that preserving any hope of "serious" satire would have seemed entirely beside the point.

For a couple of years, rumors had been circulating that ultraprolific genre-torturer Miike Takashi was hoping to direct a new Zatoichi film, with Kitano to star, but when that plan failed to materialize, Katsu's former partner pressed a reluctant Kitano to take the reins. After a string of commercially and critically disappointing films – the cloying Kikujiro, the confused Brother, the abominable Dolls – the possibilities of treating the culturally cherished Zatoichi as more than a mere pincushion must have seemed as promising a next step for the director as any. Historically, the Zatoichi films haven't exactly been a showcase for great filmmaking: despite veteran left-winger and Onibaba auteur Kaneto Shindo's late-cycle entry about the travails of a farming collective, the series allowed one contract hack after another to collect an easy paycheck. So much the more surprising, then, that Kitano's Zatoichi turns out to be not just a tremendous amount of fun to watch, but also clearly the best film he's made in years.

Delighting in the opportunity to tweak audience expectations, Kitano devotes one sight gag after another to desecrating iconographic tradition – both Zatoichi's and his own. His close-cropped hair dyed an outrageous shade of sun-blanched blond, Kitano's Zatoichi looks nothing like what one expects from either the character or the comedian, who's even traded in his trademark eye twitch for a series of furious grimaces and grindings of his jaw. He's also amped up his directorial style, demolishing the static compositions he's long been known for with broad slashes of camera movement, and countering his first foray into period-piece filmmaking with mischievously modern spurts of computerized cartoon gore and arterial spray. And while there's nothing particularly new about the film's plot – Zatoichi wanders into a small village and quickly begins playing two warring criminal tribes off each other, a setup stolen directly from Yojimbo – the way the director pays homage to his source material's creator is a distinct relief. Whereas Dolls, hopefully, proved the last gasp of Kitano's ill-advised admiration for the nauseatingly overdesigned final films of Kurosawa, Zatoichi manages to reinvent some of the more distinctively noir-ish aspects of Kurosawa's 1950s work, and never more strikingly so than in a rain-drenched showdown staged in the nightmarish glare of broad daylight.

Finally, though, the greatest of Zatoichi's accomplishments may be the way it allows Kitano to have everything both ways at once. Adhering to the genre flick's demands for a fast-moving and compelling narrative (not to mention salting the film's box office bait by casting hunky heartthrob Tadanobu Asano as his costar), the director also manages to afford himself plenty of time to play with exactly those sorts of comedy-variety elements he's spent years perfecting for the TV audience at home. More and more, one begins to notice the way that, for example, the minor entertainments in the film's geisha houses – everything from silly pantomime sketches to a guy who specializes in plate-twirling – seem like nothing so much as time fillers from The Carol Burnett Show. Even the film's fantastic soundtrack – driven by a compellingly rhythmic and antically percussive score by Keiichi Suzuki, and cued to all manner of ticktock, click-clack background behavior by field-hoe-ing farmers and boisterous barn builders – leads to a showstopping musical moment designed to bring down the house: a tap-dancing extravaganza featuring Stomp-inspired Japanese hoof troupe the Stripes. The blind Zatoichi manages to open his eyes for that one, though of course it's Kitano, ever the joker, who – with a cosmic-absurdist pratfall that leaves his hero stranded somewhere between face down in the mud and frozen in outer space – grabs the final laugh.

'The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi' opens Fri/23 at the Embarcadero Center Cinema, Embarcadero Center, promenade level, S.F. (415) 267-4893 or 777-FILM, #154. See Movie Clock for show times.