In Contention

Tag: Takashi Miike

  • CANNES CHECK: ‘Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai’

    The director: Takashi Miike (Japan)

    The talent: Leading man Ebizô Ichikawa is a well-regarded Kabuki actor with a short screen résumé. International audiences are likelier to recognize his more senior co-star, Kôji Yakusho (“Shall We Dance,” “Babel”), who worked with Miike on the recent “13 Assassins” (currently in US theaters, reviewed here). Also returning from Miike’s last samurai epic is Oscar-winning producer Jeremy Thomas (“The Last Emperor”). He’s not the only Oscar-winning “Emperor” alumnus here: revered composer Ryuichi Sakamoto is on board. Finally, a note for trivia buffs: costume designer Kazuko Kurosawa is Akira’s daughter, so I’m guessing she knows her samurai.

    The pitch: After this year’s Berlinale effectively sanctioned the union of 3D and the arthouse, Cannes is following suit: Miike’s latest is the first 3D film to play in Competition. That gimmick aside, “Hara-Kiri” sounds classical enough. Based on a Yasuhiko Takiguchi novel that was previously filmed in 1962, the film centers on a failed samurai whose request to commit ritual suicide is dismissed by his commander — the starting point for a tangle of backstories leading to (what else?) “a tense showdown of vengeance.”

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  • VENICE: ‘Black Venus,’ ’13 Assassins,’ ‘Attenberg,’ ‘A Sad Trumpet Ballad’

    On my way to Tom Tykwer’s latest, so no time for an intro. Further rounding up highlights (and lowlights) of the Venice competition lineup:

    Expectations were appreciably high, and the press screening queue consequently doubled back on itself, for Abdellatif Kechiche’s historical drama “Black Venus” (**1/2) – after all, Kechiche had a hit on the Lido three years ago with the excellent “The Secret of the Grain,” and for those who know it, the story he’s working with here seemed overdue for screen treatment. By the time the credits rolled on this hard, dense, 165-minute slap of a movie, however, applause was more scattered than one might have expected for a display of such voluminous craft and ambition; the silence, one suspects, was that of an audience assessing which lines had and hadn’t been crossed.

    For my part, I remain stuck in a halfway house between immense appreciation that Kechiche has brought the extraordinary story of Saartjie Baartman, the black South African maid whose unusual physique (and genitalia) briefly made her the toast of the European vaudeville circuit in the 19th century, to the screen; and regret that he’s chosen to tell it in such a way that the film becomes complicit in the objectification it claims to decry.

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