6 min. read
I’ve only seen a little over a handful of Takeshi Kitano’s films in my lifetime. That includes a palpable mix of roles in a career that’s lasted more than half a century; If you told me that that guy I saw in Johnny Mnemonic when I was thirteen would have an impact on my interest in film over the years, I would’ve looked at you peculiarly.
At any rate, the films I have seen have been ample at helping me gauge Kitano’s approach to violence, drama, and black comedy, even when at the service of other directors. His latest directing effort, adding to a career at the helm that has lasted more than thirty years, now comes in the form of Kubi, an adaptation of his own novel published by Kadokawa, and with decades of development dating back as far as 1993.
Beginning in 1579, Kitano’s Kubi takes its own account of the events leading up to the Honnoji Incident, the night when Oda Nobunaga (Ryo Kase) mysteriously died in an inferno. The movie also focuses much of its story on the warlords targeted by the daimyo in each of their subversive quests for advancement and conquering of power to lead Japan.
Other characters at the core of Kubi are Araki Murashige (Kenichi Endo) who led a rebellion against Nobunaga – accused then of treason and rendered fugitive, and Akechi Mitsuhide (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a general in service of Nobunaga, as well as Sorori Shinzaemon (Yuichi Kimura), a traveling bard in service of Toyotomi Hideyoshi (Kitano) after shedding his ninja ways.
At the fulcrum of this particular tale though is Kitano’s Hideyoshi, an influential warlord of his time despite his peasant background. With the help of strategist and adviser Kuroda Kanbei (Tadanobu Asano) and fellow warlord and half-brother Hashiba Hidenaga (Nao Omori), Hideyoshi sets off on a scheme to assure his own political survival, and subsequent ascent to power.
Several factors in that effort sit at Hideyoshi’s disposal, one being a secret letter from Nobunaga sent to one of his sons, exposing the feudal lord’s true intentions despite his many brokering promises and attempts to string along subordinates. One other aspect to Hideyoshi’s mission pertains to what he ultimately learns of Mitsuhide’s goings-on, and a plot to bait Nobunaga into believing that Tokugawa Ieyasu (Karou Kobayashi) is helping Murashige to evade capture.
Kubi makes plenty sure to immerse itself in the brutal, wild, and barbaric setting of the wartorn Sengoku era. Beyond the gratuituous violence and gore though, is the distinct characterizations of each individual. The rarely-seen homoerotic depictions of these characters are affirmed in Kitano’s vision with Nobunaga often the dominant force on screen.
Kase’s portrayal of the historical figure is one whose sadistic, over-the-top likeness is essential to the film’s more boisterous and eccentric appeal as a period piece. It’s a standout performance on which the rest of the cast further carries along the story in all its intricacies and interwoven subplotting and character arcs.
Endo and Nishijima’s performances of Murashige and Mitsuhide – both in their own torment – are par for the course in that same taboo space of convolution, the kind so iterated by Mitsuhide early on in a scene with Hideyoshi regarding the shared affections between samurai. To add, there are other characters enveloped in Nobunaga’s close circle, including a dissimilar, iteration of Nobunaga’s legendary retainer Yasuke (Jun Soejima) whose role in this moot presentation of feudal history is one to keep an eye on.
For that matter – and then some, Kubi is a violent and bloody affair littered with corpses of samurai, ninja, and civilians alike, with Kitano sure to make visible the epic and explosive battoes, and graphic and bloody kills on which his movie – and its title – stands on. More to the point though is the significance placed on the value people put on collecting heads for their daimyo.
Kitano subverts this with his usual gutpunching satirical flair on occasion, alluding to more cynical tones about humanity; One key narrative explored here pertains to how inconsequential and farcical human life is compared to what you can attain in status and power for someone’s head, and a few fatal ounces of spilled blood. Kitano takes this aspect of the story and flips it on its head in a number of sequences and story arcs, whether its through Nobunaga’s bravado and sneering at life, or a lowly mad peasant’s quest to become a noble samurai despite being haunted by the ghost of the friend he murders in the first half of the film.
Following its Cannes premiere in 2023, Kubi garnered its share of mixed reviews – some certainly more critical than others; The late Akira Kurosawa argued of Kitano’s film in its nascency that it would “surely rival” his 1954 banner success, Seven Samurai, and so it’s no stretch to say that a film like Kubi might not be for everyone. To its credit though, it’s a film in which Kitano gets to contribute his own interpretive best on both sides of the lens. The final shot serves to echo the kind of black comedy that could be construed as tonally dissonant to the film’s more reverent overtones.
Alas, in all its subjectivity, it really depends on what your expectations are from a film like Kubi, a chambara epic on which the celebrated cinéaste allows himself to spread his creative wings and kill a lot of people. If a subversive jidaigeki genre oddity that cuts loose when it can and leaves a trail of bodies and tons of blood in its wake is your thing, then maybe it’ll be worth sticking your own kubi out for Kitano here and then.
Kubi was reviewed for the 17th edition of Japan Cuts which runs from July 10 through 21.
