Food x 2 (Sukiyaki Western Django (DVD))

Member Name: berlioz II

Product:	Sukiyaki Western Django (DVD)
Date:	04/04/09 (222 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Some fun homages to cult films

Disadvantages: But the whole film is more style over substance to not really hit it off satisfactorily

Lately I've become quite intoxicated with spaghetti westerns... which I guess doesn't come as a very big revelation to any of my regular readers. Anyway, there's just something in them that appeals to me, which I attribute to the often brutal stories that are executed with a lot of stylish flair; stories in which it's not always a given that the good guys win, or whether the good guys really are particularly good to begin with. It is the complete opposite of the black and white, good guys are good, bad guys are bad concepts of the old Hollywood western, epitomised by such people like John Wayne and Ronald Reagan. It is the whole blurring of the lines to present highly ambiguous characters usually set in a brutal, man eats man world, where it's hard to figure out whether you're supposed to be rooting the "hero" on at all, that I like more so than any sanitized John Ford western with its clean sets and equally clean getups with clearly defined characters. Therefore, it was with great interest that I came about in picking up Japanese director Takashi Miike's controversial 2007 samurai spaghetti western Sukiyaki Western Django, a film that is a highly stylish tribute to the samurai and Italian western genres of film. The title itself consists of the traditional Japanese cuisine of sukiyaki, which apparently is one of those dishes you need to know how to make properly in order to be a gunfighter (the old "you shoot as well as you cook" recipe), and more concretely of the clear reference of Sergio Corbucci's 1966 cult classic western Django. The food part doesn't figure too highly in the film, but the Django part does act as a very strong model for a lot of this, while Miike also includes copious amounts of other tributes and such into the fabric of the action.

The story, as you would expect from a samurai and spaghetti western homage film, takes the most familiar staple plot you can get: that of Yojimbo. Again, as in Yojimbo, as well as in the subsequent A Fistful of Dollars and Django, the film features a lone drifter entering a town overrun by two feuding clans, these being the red Heike clan and the white Genji clan, both taken out of Japanese history along with their leaders, Kiyomori and Yoshitsune. The story itself supposedly takes place "several hundred years after the Battle of Dannoura" and makes a lot of references to Shakespeare's Henry VI, notably the War of the Roses (Kiyomori even wants to be called Henry, because the text says the "reds win"). The result is an undeniably stylish effort, but from a story aspect, a very uneven one. If I were to describe Sukiyaki Western Django with only a couple of words, I'd say this is what a Japanese Quentin Tarantino film would look like. The closest relative to Miike's film would most undoubtedly be Tarantino's Kill Bill, only with the difference that Sukiyaki Western Django is nowhere near as engaging with its plot than Kill Bill was (which is already saying something). The big problem with Miike's western is that this is one of the biggest cases of style over substance than I've seen in a while. Essentially, the first part of the film is like a big set up piece. Characters are introduced. They strut around speaking grandly and setting up their own agendas. There are two long flashback sequences very early on, one detailing the history of the two clans and why they are in the town, and the other filling in the backstory of the kid Heihachi, a half-breed whose parents were both Heike and Genji, and how that family was torn apart in the strife of the two clans. The second part then consists almost only of violent action with a lot of shooting and stuff.

The story is rather basic, and everything is laid out in quite a simple manner, eliminating surprises early on and robbing all sense of intrigue in the process. Even some "big" revelations probably don't come out as being all that surprising like they probably were intended to. The characters themselves are almost all caricatures of well-known genre staples, like the main character "The Gunman", played by Hideaki Ito, being a quiet, cool and stoic western hero with guns in every crevice; or the foolish, comic red leader Kiyomori (Koichi Sato) and his cool, menacing counterpart in the white leader Yoshitsune (Yusuke Iseya). We also have the seemingly drugged up Ruriko (Kaori Momoi), who becomes one of those Tarantinoesque women who can kick ass just as well as any man; the dancer-turned-prostitute mother of Heihachi, Shizuko (Yoshino Kimura); and the loser town sheriff who is bossed around by the two clans, and who irritatingly develops a split personality half-way through the film pretty much out of nowhere. Also making a special appearance, and further drawing out the parallels of Kill Bill and the like, is Quentin Tarantino himself playing the part of Piringo, the mentor of the woman known as "Bloody Benten" (guess who that turns out to be) and all-around expert on how to make sukiyaki apparently. Tarantino's performance is what it is, and really I can't see it as being anything else but an apparent friend's favour as both Miike and Tarantino hold each other in high respect (Tarantino calls Miike one of the most significant directors around today). What all of this leads to, however, is that the film doesn't really have an identity of its own, and I don't quite know how one should approach it.

One of the things that will strike you immediately, and also one of its most controversial aspects, is that all the actors are speaking English. The problem is that none are really all that good at it. Hideaki Ito's The Gunman in particular is one of the worst offenders in that some of his lines are pretty near unintelligible, so mashed up is the pronunciation, and many of the others don't fare all that well either. Only Yoshino Kimura speaks anywhere near fluently, but she never gets too many lines anyway, and Yusuke Iseya is pretty good too, but is forced to say such idiotically corny lines like "Keep it in your pants... lilly liver" or "Nau, will you come at me, or whistle Dixie" or "Now I really wanna draw iron at ya"... Yeah. That sort of stuff can really mark down any sense of credibility of your main big bad villain. And the big problem with the language barrier of course results in that you'll need to use subtitles anyway in order to understand the Engrish in many places, making the whole point of them speaking English pointless. Miike did explain that his reason for the language was that topographically they'd of course speak English where they're at instead of Japanese, but that's a rather weak explanation for an attempt at doing something new, yet not quite pulling it off due to technical problems. Another part of the film, and an important one at that, is again the Tarantino-like droppings of cult film references, in this case mostly spaghetti western ones. Django is the obvious source for a lot of these, as the title suggests, and we do get to see a regular paraphernalia of Django related homages, from the coffin with the gatling gun, the famous cross of Mercedes Zaro used rather innovatively, and even the end credits song is the main title song of Django. Personally I found these types of tributes to be pretty fun to spot (there's even Colonel Mortimer's horse-bound gun rack from For a Few Dollars More complete with a Jew's harp twang), but the problem with these kinds of homages of course always comes from the fact that if you don't know what is being referenced, you'll likely end up missing a big part of the fun of the whole film.

The film itself is shot with using a lot of various techniques, all very modern, but unfortunately fail to create a visually alluring whole due to many of the techniques used being so familiar from contemporary cinema, like the over-burnt filtering à la The Three Kings in the flashbacks, or the shaky camera movement of many an action film. There are some quite neat tricks in there, like a bullet being spliced in half with a katana, or how the entire opening scene is set at a theatre stage, or how camera angles are used to create some fine moments of stylishness, but ultimately these are too random and too inconsistent to tie too well into a visually stimulating whole. The costumes are all rather good, though, making good use of the freedom of doing something a bit more out-of-the-ordinary. However, the music of Koji Endo by comparison ends up being very contemporary and nearing on sound design, with none of the music bearing much of that memorability of what the Italian westerns usually featured, which is an odd decision considering how much of a tribute this film is supposed to be, and how important music always was for those older Italian films, though it indeed was a nice touch to have Luis Enrique Bacalov's Django song for the end credits, only made even more contemporary and sung in Japanese. But ultimately, Sukiyaki Western Django is an oddball film that has a lot in the way of style, but doesn't really have anything in the way of substance. The first half is simple set-up, and the latter half simple massacring. The homages are fun, but they're just not enough to make the film good. The film is simply too shallow, too random, and too stylish for the sake of being stylish that the whole endeavour just falls flat on its face. It is Miike trying to be Quentin Tarantino, yet only manages to produce a Tarantino look-a-like film with no identity of its own. A good idea, but ideas are only good if they are executed well. Sukiyaki Western Django wasn't.

© berlioz, 2009

Summary: "A few years later, the kid, Heihachi, made his way to Italy and was known as a man called Django."