Love and Honor
Directed by Yôji Yamada
Aug. 1-7
At Two Boots Pioneer Theater
Veteran filmmaker Yôji Yamada closes his thematic trilogy about the last samurai and the end of traditional values with Love and Honor (2006), the most melodramatic of the three films. While its predecessors—The Twilight Samurai (2002) and The Hidden Blade (2004)—were about newfound responsibilities and blossoming love in a bygone era, Love and Honor is about the marital winter that follows autumnal courtship. Think Away From Her except with samurai instead of Oscar-baiting old folks.
With that in mind, Love and Honor is the most melodramatic of Yamada’s trilogy. In it, low-level samurai Shinnojo Mimura (Takuya Kimura) succumbs to a festering and almost lethal blow to his ego, forcing him to stagnate quietly behind closed doors instead of in public as the protagonists of Twilight and Blade do. As a poison taster, Mimura falls ill suddenly after eating some bad sashimi, forcing his wife Kayo (Rei Dan) to take care of him. In being so abruptly stripped of his power and responsibilities, he loses faith in everything he once held dear, including Kayo.
Yamada maintains a level of cold distance between the couple and the viewer by using fairly basic camerawork to complement his old-fashioned storytelling. Emiko Hiramatsu, Yamada and Ichiro Yamamoto’s script, based on a novel by Shuhei Fujisawa, is reminiscent of the classic bunraku dramas of Monzaemon Chikamatsu. Like Chikamatsu’s wildly popular and influential Love Suicides at Sonezaki, Love and Honor has little to no real dramatic contrast. As such, both feature a tragically fallen woman, a comically faithful but befuddled man servant and a tragically proud hero with an ethereal death wish.
Also like Sonezaki, Love and Honor wavers between scenes of overwrought and genuinely affecting sentimentality. Thanks to its focus on internal struggle and domestically confined drama, Love and Honor is the wilting lily of Yamada’s trilogy, albeit an exceptionally satisfying romance.
Directed by Yôji Yamada
Aug. 1-7
At Two Boots Pioneer Theater
Veteran filmmaker Yôji Yamada closes his thematic trilogy about the last samurai and the end of traditional values with Love and Honor (2006), the most melodramatic of the three films. While its predecessors—The Twilight Samurai (2002) and The Hidden Blade (2004)—were about newfound responsibilities and blossoming love in a bygone era, Love and Honor is about the marital winter that follows autumnal courtship. Think Away From Her except with samurai instead of Oscar-baiting old folks.
With that in mind, Love and Honor is the most melodramatic of Yamada’s trilogy. In it, low-level samurai Shinnojo Mimura (Takuya Kimura) succumbs to a festering and almost lethal blow to his ego, forcing him to stagnate quietly behind closed doors instead of in public as the protagonists of Twilight and Blade do. As a poison taster, Mimura falls ill suddenly after eating some bad sashimi, forcing his wife Kayo (Rei Dan) to take care of him. In being so abruptly stripped of his power and responsibilities, he loses faith in everything he once held dear, including Kayo.
Yamada maintains a level of cold distance between the couple and the viewer by using fairly basic camerawork to complement his old-fashioned storytelling. Emiko Hiramatsu, Yamada and Ichiro Yamamoto’s script, based on a novel by Shuhei Fujisawa, is reminiscent of the classic bunraku dramas of Monzaemon Chikamatsu. Like Chikamatsu’s wildly popular and influential Love Suicides at Sonezaki, Love and Honor has little to no real dramatic contrast. As such, both feature a tragically fallen woman, a comically faithful but befuddled man servant and a tragically proud hero with an ethereal death wish.
Also like Sonezaki, Love and Honor wavers between scenes of overwrought and genuinely affecting sentimentality. Thanks to its focus on internal struggle and domestically confined drama, Love and Honor is the wilting lily of Yamada’s trilogy, albeit an exceptionally satisfying romance.
