Seven Samurai (1954)

directed by Akira Kurosawa

Japan

207 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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For a long time I was carrying around a dirty little secret, and that secret was that despite being a huge fan of Showa-era Japanese film, I had not seen Seven Samurai. I wasn't unfamiliar with Kurosawa, and I wanted to watch this, but you gotta carve out time for a 207-minute-long movie, even when you know doing so will be a rewarding experience. (This is not, as of this time, the longest movie I've ever seen; it is tied with Inagaki's 1963 Chushingura, which is also exactly 207 minutes.) Many people have written a library's worth of words about this movie far more intelligently than I ever could, but not saying at least something about it feels wrong.

It's kind of amazing that almost four hours of film can come out of a remarkably simple premise. The plot of the film is that a village of poor farmers, pushed to near-starvation by continued bandit raids on their rice crops, hires a group of samurai to fight back against the bandits and protect them. The film is split down the middle by an intermission, and while I'm not sure if it was intentional to divide it into two distinct halves, there is a definite change in tone, from a focus on planning in the first half to a focus on doing in the second. And the beauty of it is that the planning stages are almost as interesting, if not more so, than the action.

Now, this was my first watch, and I haven't even read any of those far more intelligent things people have said about this movie yet. But I think I'm onto it. I think I might have it figured out. I think the idea here is that Seven Samurai is not about the samurai.

Kurosawa does this thing that I've noticed in almost all of his films where he has a way of making characters - even ones who should be the "protagonists", ones who we spend the most time with and should be getting to know the best - decentralized. Instead of populating his movies with heroes, he populates them with people, making it so the characters who are in the spotlight feel like they're functionally no deeper than the villagers in the background. We never get much backstory on the seven, and if you're not familiar with the movie, like I wasn't, you might be expecting that. I think the movie plays with that expectation intentionally: it's only the leader of the seven, Shimada (played by Takashi Shimura in one of his best performances), who realizes that the victory belongs to the peasants, not his group. Neither are the antagonists ever expanded upon: the difference between villain and victim here is somewhat ill-defined, and the film presents a cycle of violence that should make the viewer slightly uneasy about assigning glory to any side.

The best example of this kind of surprising de-valorization of characters who would in any other movie have been framed as heroes comes in Kikuchiyo's death. Most if not all of the samurai do have at least some kind of personality, but Kikuchiyo is the most outsized by far - of course he is, it's Toshiro Mifune in the role - and he dies in the mud without final words, like a peasant. Which he was - he's one of the only characters to have backstory, and we learn that he was born a poor farmer just like the villagers he's reluctantly protecting. That totally unexpected coda to an incredibly colorful, loud, energetic character is the perfect example of how this movie shifts the focus off of who we would expect to be focused on, and onto the people in the background.

Seven Samurai is one of those movies where time has done it a bit of a disservice - it's not that it doesn't warrant the reputation it has as one of the best movies ever made, but its constant popularity throughout the past 70 years has done a lot to obscure our context of the film. Because movies like this can be made with relative ease today through the use of CGI and other "cheats", one can sometimes forget that all of this was real, physical stuff; real sets, real mud, real (extremely terrified) horses. The history of Japanese cinema began decades earlier, but I would argue that with such landmark films as Seven Samurai, Godzilla, and Twenty-Four Eyes, 1954 was a huge step for the country's film industry.

I won't brook a single argument about whether or not this deserved to be three hours and forty minutes long. It deserves to be longer, if it wants to be. There's nothing in here that feels unnecessary to the larger picture. Visually, narratively, and in its dialogue, this is a really monumental film. But it's also that way because of what isn't in it. It's brilliant because it leaves these holes through which you can get a better feel for the real core of it. The end doesn't feel triumphant - the peasants certainly seem to have triumphed, but there's not a sense of satisfying victory. But the end isn't the point. To risk deploying a cliche, this is a movie that is totally about the journey rather than the destination.