Then came the Italians such as Spaghetti maestro Sergio Leone who with films as Once Upon a Time in the West re-animated the by then stilted genre of the Western and gave it raw, new energy. Playing into the Yojimbo-mode was Sergio Corbucci's super-violent Spaghetti Western Django, about a coffin-dragging gunslinger who – yes – enters a town caught between two feuding factions...
And now we have Miike’s “Sukiyaki Western.” For some obscure reason, "Spaghetti Westerns" are called Macaroni Westerns in Japan, but anyhow the closest native equivalent would have been a noodle dish like udon or ramen. But these dishes are not known outside Japan and "Sushi Western" is a bit strange as those cowboys were certainly no lovers of raw fish - so here comes Japans' native beef stew Sukiyaki - also physically present as it is cooked at the start of the film in the opening sequence with American Miike-fan and colleague Quentin Tarantino.
What is the movie about
Sukiyaki Western Django not only pays homage to Kurosawa's Yojimbo, but also transports Japans’ epic struggle between the rival clans of the Genji and the Heike (12th c.) to the Wild West and at the same time plays a riff on England’s War of the Roses.
The action takes places in the dusty mountain town of Yuta, Nebada (the "b" is Japanese). Yuta has been taken over by two rival groups of bandits, the red Heike, led by raving-mad Kiyomori (Sato Koichi) and the white Genji, under dandyish but ultra-mean Yoshitsune (Iseya Yusuke). Among his followers is also the cross-bow wielding Yoichi (Ando Masanobu). They are fighting each other and intimidating the town folk while hunting for a treasure hidden in the hills.
Then the classical taciturn, lone and nameless gunman (Ito Hideaki) rides into Yuta, looking for the gold, and is immediately courted by both the Heike and the Genji as a latter-day Yojimbo. Instead, he teams up with go-getting grandma Ruriko (Momoi Kaori) who runs the general store and her mute grandson Heihachi, who is half-Genji, half-Heike and more of an artistic bent than the people around him. Heihachi's father has tragically been killed by the Heike and his widowed mother Shizuka (Kimura Yoshino) now works as the town's whore in the Genji saloon.
So the stage is set for a grand show-down, in which a huge, antique "gatling gun" plays an important role, Ruriko shows that she has a past as a gunslinger by blazing away a large number of opponents and the joke from Indiana Jones of pistol against sword is turned on its head - and then resolved in an unexpected way.
What did I like about the movie
The cultural mashup
Miike creates an Old West that is an East West, because the inhabitants are Japanese and at the entrance to the old-west town we know so well from countless other flicks stands a Shinto torii gate (with a body hanging from the beam!), while the decorations in the saloon are traditional Japanese wall paintings. A cultural mash-up if ever there was one, a drunken merry-go-round of symbols representing symbols and allusions to countless other allusions…
The Japanese speaking English
Yes, this film is in English - Miike's second one, after Imprint. First I thought I would hate the English delivered by Japanese actors, but there is logic to this seeming oddity. Apparently, the original Spaghetti Westerns were often filmed without a soundtrack and then would be dubbed in the language of the country the film was going to be released in (as pointed out in this review). This led to the same disjointed mouth movements as in Miike’s present film. On top of that, the English in Sukiyaki Western is not ordinary, colloquial English, but a sort of ornate, literary and out-of-date lingo. The leader of the Heike is even practicing Shakespeare and asks his men to call him “Hen-ray”...
Our ears are shifted into this accented, stilted English by Quentin Tarantino, who plays an opening sequence in which he tells the story of the Genji and the Heike, gradually Japanizing his English, as if he, too, is phonetically delivering lines he does not understand…
Strangely, this horrible English grows upon you, although it is sometimes so unintelligible that you have the read the subtitles to make sense of the dialogue.
But rest assured that Miike is in on the joke: one old actor’s words are so garbled that a long-nosed, white fellow follows him around for simultaneous translation…
Vintage Miike - violence laced with humor
Visually, the film is stunning. It ranges from the garish – in the beginning with the cheap stage and card-board Fuji – to the sublime, when the snow starts falling during the last fight. Some of the young warriors look more like glamorous rockers than samurai or cowboys, in contrast to the heroic silent gunman who is dressed in authentic Western style.
Sukiyaki Western Django has also been filled to the brim with eye-popping stunts and over the top sequences. To name a few:
- with his huge shotgun Benkei blasts a football-sized hole through an opponent, after which Yoichi shoots an arrow through it right into another enemy;.
- a lesson among the Genji in warding of a sword with Zen-like one-mindedness goes horribly wrong;
- a hypocritical sheriff is impaled on a church-cross and first cannot believe he is dead as he was rather injury-resistant in the rest of the film.
Critical opinion about Sukiyaki Western Django is divided. True, this is Miike at his baroque best, full of postering and gestures, messing with your mind just for the fun of it. It is a different world from his strongest films, as Rainy Dog or Ley Lines, where the people are real, and we can feel their pain.
In Sukiyaki Western Django there is no pain despite all the unbelievable ways in which people manage to get themselves killed. This is pure entertainment, as fake as fake can be, but we all know it, so where's the harm? Let's have fun instead, and fun it is, from start to finish...
Links
Official website
