This is Matatabi, or The Wanderers, and one that I wish I had talked about much closer to when I watched it! It was one case where buying a blu ray of a movie I’d never heard of, just off of the strength of the cover and vaguely knowing the director’s name (Kon Ichikawa directed the famous Inugami Family adaptation along with a lot of other Kindaichi novel adaptations, but I hadn’t seen any of them then) happened to work out extremely well, as I thought this movie was very interesting and I loved discovering it.
I believe the blu ray ended up not having subtitles (which I would have known to check for beforehand now and probably would have discouraged me from buying it if I’d known how at the time), and it was an interesting challenge to keep up with the movie without them right from the beginning, where the titular trio are introduced going through – I think – basically a highly ritualized mechanical recitation of a long formal speech asking for shelter and then receiving a similar speech giving it from the shady proprietors they end up staying with at each point in their wanderings (in return, I think, for odd jobs and yakuza underling type stuff). These speeches are rattled off from memory before eventually a character is like “eehh forget all that let’s get to brass tax” and of course I tracked none of the individual components of the formal part and not all that much of the casual parts either. I think it was one of those cases though where I felt as I was watching it there was likely a lot that I was missing, but checking synopses after the fact, it really only clued me in on a few additional details that tracked with what I’d gleaned. It does at least though mean that it’s a case where it’s an interesting movie I wanted to feel like I had a reading on, but where I couldn’t really be 100% sure of what information any single scene was denoting because of the very imperfect listening comprehension, which was an interesting position to be in and may be a big reason why I’ve let it linger for an especially long time before writing any of this.
The thing I remember admiring very much about the movie is the… hardscrabble crappiness of everything. The life of a wanderer in this bygone era is utterly unromanticized here, and whenever any fights break out, it’s a pitiful, awkward, somehow embarrassing scrap in the dust, with combatants scrambling for dropped swords and crashing inelegantly through creaky old doors.
I think the movie is about dispelling in those kinds of ways the sense of glory and duty that might be informing a young man like the protagonist how they’re going to comport themselves as they come of age.
As crappy as everything is, there’s definitely a cold beauty to the movie also, and definitely a sense that there’s a beauty to their weird found community of the group traveling in the latter part of the movie, an agreement that there is something worth protecting and worth retreating to – or at least an empathy as to why the characters would make those choices to do so. The main female character is interesting on this subject.
Anyway, I was really taken with this one! It’s so rare that you get to come across something with no real context to speak of going into it whatsoever, and it impresses you all the more for it. It’s definitely not a jidai movie to reach for if you want samurai action, but if you want a bummer no frills coming of age road trip kind of movie in a historical setting, could be good to check out!