***/****
starring Makiya Yamaguchi, Norimasa Fuke, Rantaro Mine, Yuno Sakura
written and directed by Junichi Yasuda
by Walter Chaw Jun-ichi Yasuda’s A Samurai in Time is a lightweight, nostalgia-streaked, deceptively sad little flick in which a bedraggled Edo-period samurai named Kosaka Shinzaemon (Makiya Yamaguchi) finds himself, at the moment of his most meaningful duel against the evil Kyoichiro Kazami (Ken Shonozaki), finds himself transported to the present and mistaken for an extra on a samurai television show. Guided by old-world decorum and generally astonished as a fish-out-of-water, he falls under the kind auspices of script supervisor Yuko (Yuno Sakura), who takes him under her wing and helps him get progressively better roles as the sort of fight extra–a kiraeyaku–who “gets slashed” in jidaigeki productions like hers. A Samurai in Time doesn’t break any new ground, but it trods those worn boards with a spring in its step. I loved a moment where Kosaka tastes a little dessert and, in horror, asks if they made a mistake giving it to someone as lowly as he. When told that anyone has a right to eat such miracles in modern Japan, he weeps and declares his relief that a country he left in war and on the brink of collapse would become such a generous, egalitarian society as to treat all its citizens, from top to bottom, as royalty. I appreciate science-fiction that’s aspirational rather than apocalyptic. It’s hard to see sometimes how far we’ve come.
As his star rises, he’s noticed by legendary jidaigeki actor Kyoichiro Kazami (Norimasa Fuke), who decides to come out of a ten-year retirement to appear in one last samurai picture, with the caveat that his opponent be Kosaka. Everyone sees this as a big deal except for Kosaka, of course, who is bound by a Bushido Code that privileges humility–at least when it best serves the samurai to be humble. Much of A Samurai in Time is good-natured ribbing at the rigidity and occasional hypocrisies of any chivalric set of behaviours. Kosaka’s obvious love for Yuko, for instance, is a topic he’s pathologically incapable of addressing because of his confusion with his status and hers in a culture that isn’t as rigidly carved along social lines as his was. When Kyoichiro pretends to make advances towards Yuko, Kosaka first mocks him for being so callow as to be attracted to a woman of low ranking as Yujo, then grabs Kyoichiro’s wrist impulsively to prevent this surprise rival for Yuko’s attentions from speaking to her. It doesn’t move mountains, A Samurai in Time, but it’s solid–even better than solid, as it’s revealed that Kosaka may not be the only samurai from Japan’s past to have teleported into the modern-day and been cast in blockbuster period pieces.
I was initially put off by the digital glaze of the piece, which bears a closer resemblance to a television show than to a movie. (The cinematography, visual effects, editing, writing, and directing duties all fell to Yasuda.) Still, the excellence of the first sword fight, choreographed by Kazuto Seike, reassured me that A Samurai In Time meant business, even if it’s not a fight flick per se. I’m attracted to films that are brutal. I don’t like to be coddled. If you’re leading me to slaughter, show me the blade and the beast. It’s been a hard ten years, though, and I’m showing the wear of it. A Samurai in Time‘s magnanimity of spirit and essential kindness ultimately won me over. Unsurprisingly, it feels a lot like Mark Twain’s time-travel fable A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, another light-seeming entertainment containing a few satirical pokes at manners and customs, plus a few wise kernels about how kindness to others may be the only thing across time that ensures we’ll have a future as a species. It’s easy to forget the simplest lessons, like how the Sermon on the Mount is supposed to replace the Ten Commandments if we have any hope of survival.
