Owned version: The box set of the complete Zatoichi series released by Criterion in 2013.
Acquired: July 19th, 2015 from a Barnes & Noble. (Criterion 50% off sale, baby!)
Seen before?: Once, from the old Home Vision Entertainment DVD (as received from Netflix) in 2004. Most likely early May. Never from the Criterion set. This is, in fact, the first time I've cracked the set. Which is exciting for me!
The joy of formula, pt. 3...
You make nine films about one character, you're bound to fall into some patterns. Especially when you're planning to make more. Adventures of Zatoichi, the ninth in what would eventually be a series of twenty-six about the wandering blind masseur/swordsman Zatoichi, slips comfortably into the dominant story beats that comprise most of the Ichi films - Ichi comes to a town under the thumb of oppression (a corrupt magistrate and a local crime boss in cahoots this time), befriends a couple locals including a young woman, outsmarts a rigged dice game in a gambling hall, drinks sake and fights anyone who attempts to make his life miserable. Then the climax has the swordsman cutting down a couple dozen anonymous foot soldiers before tackling a skilled warrior looking to prove his mettle. Every one of these films is telling the same basic story, and the series is far along enough at this point that this entry has a subtle bit of fun with that. The setting is a town that also serves as a mecca of sorts for those wishing, in the words of Ichi, "to worship the first light of the new year." Ichi remembers this place from his childhood and has returned to spend the last bits of the old year trying to find something - a brief sense of peace, maybe. Meanwhile, there's a man who has escaped from prison and returned to this town searching for his sister, and there's a cadre of vendors who have returned to this town as they do every year looking to capitalize on the celebratory occasion, knowing not that the magistrate has imposed stiff new taxes that will strip away their profits. In a series beholden to a cyclical repetition of expected formula, it's amusing to see the screenplay acknowledge that by putting most of the characters into cycles of repetition that don't go as expected.
So Ichi's trip doesn't go as he hopes. Instead of finding peace, he gets embroiled in events that reinforce his sense of isolation. Having gone through the series once before over a decade past, my memories of individual entries are not exactly crystal-clear. But as I found this worth comment back then, I feel it's safe to assume that Adventures of Zatoichi is at least unique to this point in the series in that it deals with Zatoichi's eternal isolation not as a tragedy but as a fact; indeed, part of Ichi's fury in the finale is fueled by his disappointment in coming to what he thought was a safe place and having to do the shit he always has to do. There's a thread where Ichi comes to think a local drunk might be his long-lost father, and when the drunk inevitably lets him down, the great Shintaro Katsu plays it with a rueful smile, as though he knew this moment of potential human connection was too good to be true ("For a moment, I thought I saw my father in you..."). Yasuda further accents Ichi's alienation by keeping him apart from others in group shots - if, say, the women with whom he's sharing a hotel room are in a shot with him, they'll be in the foreground while he'll be off in the background or vice versa. The effect is one of alienation - even as he walks among them, Ichi is marked as not belonging among the rest of the world.
Rather than bending to melancholy, though, Yasuda exploits this alienation in service of Ichi's ferocious fighting skills. We know his skills are superhuman - we've seen the previous films, assumedly - but Adventures of Zatoichi goes further and implies they might be literally inhuman. The great Matt Lynch criticizes this entry for making Ichi too saintly, but I think it's doing something different. The film leans into his apartness to paint him less as a skilled duelist and more as a force of nature whose whirling swordplay is an inevitable consequence of his existence. In other words, he cannot be one of us because he is not one of us. The opening scene has him chuckling in the midst of a fierce windstorm, musing on the dust blowing in his face and caught in a roil of red, oranges and browns (the cut from this bombast to kites in a placid blue sky is great). There are multiple fight sequences in which he erupts out of the pure blackness of shadows like an elemental phenomenon, an extension of the darkness sent to condemn his enemies to a different kind of darkness. And the final fight ends with him admonishing the dead, "You brought this on yourselves," then receding into the distance as snow begins to fall on the blood-soaked field of battle. He comes in with the wind and leaves with the snow, pausing for a moment only to get what he came for: the sun. One implacable fact of nature paying homage to another.
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