Tatsuya Nakadai

Akira Ishihama

Shima Iwashita

Tetsuro Tamba

Masao Mishima

Ichirō Nakatani

Kei Satō

Yoshio Inaba

Hisashi Igawa

Toru Takeuchi

Yoshirō Aoki

Tatsuo Matsumura

Akiji Kobayashi

Kōichi Hayashi

Ryūtarō Gomi

Jo Azumi

Nakajirō Tomita

Shichisaburo Amatsu

Kenzō Tanaka

Shin Nakahara

Tsuneo Ikeda

Minoru Miyagi

Takaaki Kadota

Ichirō Yamamoto

Gen Takasugi

Satoshi Nishida

Tetsuro Komiyama

Shûichirô Narita

Noboru Kasuga

Shinpachi Kura

Kenji Hayashi

Shōtarō Hayashi

Shimezo Kataoka

Bunya Ozawa

Konosuke Takemoto

Rentaro Mikuni

Shinobu Hashimoto

Yasuhiko Takiguchi

Masaki Kobayashi

Gin'ichi Kishimoto

Toru Takemitsu

Shigemasa Toda

Hisashi Sagara

Hideo Nishizaki

Junpei Oosumi

Yoshiko Kimura

Mitsuzô Ueda

Gyôuemon Kimura

Kôji Niwa

Zenichi Tajiri

Tatsuo Hosoya

Yoshio Miyajima

Action

Drama

History

切腹

Shochiku

Japan

日本語

Harakiri

suicide

japan

samurai

asia

flashback

revenge

poverty

black and white

seppuku

ronin

jidaigeki

edo period

17th century

shogunate

bushi

bakumatsu

distressing

excited

This is an amazing Japanese classic written and filmed without flaw. The action unfolds in story-telling within story-telling. This is a film about truth. Whose truth? That is the unfoldment. In a perverted way, this amazing piece of work has become predictive of Western corporate banking. Perhaps you'll see what I mean at the end of the film.

Filipe Manuel Neto

**It's a film that might scare modern audiences a bit, but it deserves the opportunity we want to give it.**

In addition to having a very strong film industry, Japan is a country with a very rich past that we in the West tend to devalue. A somewhat ethnocentric attitude, more typical of small minds. For a long time, the Japanese were a people divided by several feudal princes who fought among themselves, disputing power and regional influence. It was in this context, moreover, that the first contact between the Japanese and the Portuguese took place, the first Westerners to disembark, demonstrably (Marco Polo speaks of the Japanese, but he probably never went there), on the islands of Japan, where they took the first firearm, the Christian faith and a strong cultural influence: even today, in the Japanese language, there are hundreds of words directly imported from Portuguese.

The film that brought me here tells us about one of the most fascinating traditional figures of Japan: the samurai, a warrior similar, in essence, to the European knight. They were educated people who were willing to live off the war, as paid mercenaries. In a land where each feudal lord wages war for himself, with his own troops and against his neighbors, it was not difficult to live off war. It would be difficult to live in peace! The samurai had a code of conduct, the Bushido, which dictated rules according to which they guided their lives, seeking to live and die with honor. Honor was more important than life and therefore, in certain situations, it was expected that the samurai knew how to die and was willing to do so, even if by his own hands, in a suicide ritual.

The film begins when a samurai, left unemployed by a long peace, turns to an old man and asks to be allowed to die. In response, he hears a story that occurred some time before, and in which a samurai in the same situation made an identical request in the expectation of receiving money, and ended up having to commit suicide, and with a wooden weapon. The film then reveals an important fact: this first samurai is the father-in-law of the man who killed himself, and who wanted money to feed his sick wife and son. And in fact that warrior is not there in order to simply die, but in order to avenge the son-in-law wronged by human hypocrisy.

The film is quite dense, and the fact that it is so different from Western cinema and, even more so, in black and white, can quite scare the current public. However, it is worth resisting this impulse to reject it and giving the film a chance. It's very well done, it has a pretty good story, which is nothing behind big Hollywood hits. The script takes advantage of the situation to expose the brutality of the rigor imposed on the samurai by means of a moral code so absurdly demanding that it ended up being inhumane. Contrary to what happens in some films, even western ones, this film does a good historical contextualization of the story it tells us, not being too difficult to understand what is at stake. I'm not the best person to talk about the director or the actors, I don't know them, but I can say that we have the participation of Tatsuya Nakadai, Yoshiro Aoki and Akira Ishihama. On a technical level, I think it's impossible to avoid noticing the quality of the sets and filming locations, as well as the sharpness and quality of the cinematography.

Harakiri (1962) ORIGINAL TRAILER

Harakiri( 1962)

What befalls others today, may be your own fate tomorrow.

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A review by badelf

Written by badelf on Sun Aug 19 2012

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