Tasogare Seibei (2002)

English title: The Twilight Samurai.

Synopsis (SPOILERS): Seibei is a low-rank samurai whose wife dies leaving him two daughters to raise, which he does at great sacrifice, working as some kind of bureaucrat and doing odd jobs of handcrafting. He refuses the marriage offer of Tomoe, a childhood friend, because he thinks she belongs to a higher rank in society. A civil war emerges, and Seibei is commanded by his clan leader to kill a rebellious samurai. Before he goes, he changes his mind about Tomoe and proposes to her, but she says she has already said yes to another man's proposal. It is based on three short stories by Shuuhei Fujisawa (1927-1997) (aka Shûhei Fujisawa aka Shuhei Fujisawa); I found it impossible to determine when those stories were first published. The action is set in the mid-19th century.

Appraisal: Period drama with modest ambitions; its characters are drawn in simple lines, without much complexity, even, in some cases (e.g. Seibei's rude father), verging on the caricatural. The style is almost TV-like, and yet, as the story advances, its grip on the viewer gets ever tighter, thanks to its solid text, faultless acting, and competent mise-en-scene. The basic theme of the film, which it explores in a quite satisfactory manner, is how individual characters behave in a society of rigid rules. It seems to imply (though this is not explicitly stated) that there is more flexibility and degrees of freedom than those rigid rules would grant by themselves; and that, for people like Seibei, the adherence to the rules is to some extent a matter of voluntary choice, and of preservation of one's identity.

Rating: 63