The Magic Window

Azumi • 2003 • Directed by Ryuhei Kitamura 

Azumi opens in a moment of tragedy, as the young girl who will grow to be Azumi, silently mourning her dead mother, is taken in by a traveling Master and his group of adopted orphans. The mood quickly shifts to idyllic however, with this group of young students engaged in a mock-fight in a sun dappled forest, which ends with one of them toppled into the water by his laughing cohorts. It seems that Master Gessai (played to a world-weary "T" by the late great Yoshio Harada) has gathered together this ragtag group of youngsters, sheltered them from the world, and trained them in martial arts and sword fighting for something they know only as “Their Mission.” We are prepared for a wholesome Star Wars-ian saga ancient Japan-style, with a series of scenes of youthful dreaminess: playful roughhousing, an implied budding romance between Azumi (the only girl in the group) and the tallest, handsomest of the boys, and naïve, idealistic campfire musings on their future heroic roles to come.  

  Azumi is 'rescued' by Master Gessai after the death of her Mother...

As their training draws to a close however, Gessai announces to his overjoyed charges that they are ready to make their way in the world, and must now each pair up with their best friends, not as they expect, to form a team, but to weed out the weaklings. It seems that three warlords are threatening an uneasy peace, won in a recent, horribly destructive war. Our young heroes’ mission is to assassinate these warlords, who haven’t yet done anything wrong, on the orders of a religiously inclined military figure. (Sound familiar?) In order to carry out a task of such moral dubiousness, there is no room for weakness: anyone who can’t kill their best friend, can’t be an effective assassin. After some understandable hand wringing, the young band of brothers hack each other to bits, and Azumi, forced to fight for her life, kills her childhood  friend/boyfriend (who was quite prepared to kill her). So much for childhood innocence.

  The future assassins mourn the classmates and friends they have been obliged to kill...

Azumi was a huge hit in Asia, largely on the strength of its dizzying camera work, the most spectacular swordplay since the heyday of Kurosawa and Inagaki, and the undeniable barely-legal appeal of Pop Diva Aya Ueto, (who turns in a surprisingly subtle and affecting performance) but it bears little resemblance

  Aya Ueto IS Azumi...

either to the exuberant but often shallow Wuxia epics of the eighties Hong Kong Revival, or, for that matter, to the recent, hugely popular sweeping historical epics from Mainland China. Shot through as it is with a dark and melancholy view of life, it is as far removed from the former (The East is Red, Dragon Inn) as, with its central lack of an epic romance (Azumi having knocked off her putative love interest in the first reel), it is from the latter (Hero, House of Flying Daggers). Ryuhei Kitamura came to international attention with Versus, a funky, technically stunning hybrid of the Yakuza and Zombie genres (!), and while its cinematic razzle-dazzle caught everyone’s attention, viewers who seemed to sense that Kitramura was aiming for, but not quite hitting, a higher target, were frustrated by its lack of characterization and its largely incomprehensible plot. With Azumi, Kitamura has greatly strengthened his storytelling skills, his ability to deliver believable, affecting characters, and most importantly, his apparent desire to colour his genre piece with a surprising depth and ambiguity that instantly raises Azumi above the usual level of simple swordplay costume drama.
Make no mistake however, Azumi is, first and foremost, a cracking good adventure movie, which delivers an astonishing series of action sequences which have no equal in recent Hong-Kong or Mainland productions. Virtually devoid of fanciful wire-aided wall climbing and tree-leaping, Azumi’s battle sequences retain, even in their most astounding moments, a grim, gritty real-world quality that make believable even its most fantastic conceits, most notably our young heroine’s exceptionally ferocious ability to dispatch vast numbers of savage foes with a preternatural calm and determination. Balancing the requisite action (in a way that never interrupts the action/adventure aspect) are moments of tenderness, tragedy, connection and loss that ring true in a way that enhances both the story and the deeper emotional grounding with which Kitamura imbues his seemingly simple Martial Arts Hero Flick.

Early on in their journey, Gessai forces his young charges to stand by helplessly and watch the ravaging of a buculic village by a band of savage bandits, in order that their mission not be compromised. “Why”, they all keep asking, as the carnage unfolds before them.

  The young assassins ask "Why"....

  ...as history repeats itself...

They encounter their first target, the warlord Nagamasa, peacefully fishing with his men by the bank of a river. Azumi takes an instant liking to this uncommonly jocular and likable warlord and, when he confirms his identity, she throws a cloth over his face so that she will not see his face as she kills him. 

  Assassin Rule Number One: Don't take a liking to your targets...

Again, she asks “Why?” These WHYs form a thread of skepticism about the black and white notions of unquestioning duty and loyalty that permeate even many of the best of the aforementioned Martial Arts films. Although, in the end, Azumi assumes just that attitude, and accepts her destiny as an assassin (as much for the sake of those two lucrative sequels as for the demands of the story) this sense of questioning, and an ability to convey the painful results of conflict in a simple and eloquent way, again subtly separate Azumi from its many peers.

  Jô Odagiri as Azumi's nemesis, the vicious, philosophy-spouting assassin Bijomaru...

In even the best of the recent spate of Ancient Chinese sagas, the characters tend to be as much symbols of eternal truths as living, breathing fully-fleshed out characters. Here again, Azumi distinguishes itself from the pack. With the exception of the effeminate rose-loving aesthete/assassin Bijomaru  (played with icy, creepy perfection by Jô Odagiri), none of the characters are the all-good or all-evil cliches one might expect. Master Gessai, who seems at first to be a heartless and stubborn stoic, reveals unexpected moments of tenderness for his young charges, just as his students are capable of shocking and unexpected brutality and callousness. The warlord Nagamasa who would rather fish than fight, the henchman Suro, who takes his life in his hands by mercifully finishing off a victim whose inevitable demise is being sadistically protracted by Bijomaru, and even Bijomaru’s ecstatic, almost comical glee at finally finding an opponent worthy of him, reveal shadings and complexities of personality that make us almost as interested in the villains of Azumi as the heroes.

  The fatalistic majesty of Azumi's visuals recalls such disparate Japanese classics as Kwaidan and Kurosawa's Ran...

One way in which Azumi does resemble its contemporaries, however, is in its physical beauty; painting a series of indelible setpieces, which have a haunting grace that lingers long after the last clanging sword. The desert landscape that opens Azumi is so quietly beautiful that at first we do not register the sad scene that is unfolding: a small child quietly sitting at the side of her dead mother. In the film’s most powerful moment, a vast sea of swirling grass and forbidding winds surround Azumi’s luckless cohort Hyuga, as he valiantly stands his ground on a single dusty path that bisects the field, to defend his newfound girlfriend Hiei against the pitiless Bijomaru. It recalls the ‘grasses with a life of their own’ in the classic Onibaba, and is a moment worthy, in its atmospheric and emotional power, of the great man Kurosawa himself.

  The Man With No Name... except Asian and gorgeous...

In a delightful moment of circular cinematic cross-influence, the delirious final act of Azumi takes its loving and unabashed inspiration from a genre itself influenced by the classic samurai films of the sixties, the Italian Western. In order to rescue her mentor Gessai, whose bravery and nobility have overcome her objections to his seemingly callous adherence to duty, (and who is strung up in the town square as bait, in a direct steal from the climax of A Fistful of Dollars), Azumi is faced with a horde of sweaty, grinning, disgusting bad guys so large that even she, ‘ultimate warror’ that she is, would not be able to defeat them all without testing our suspension of disbelief. Instead, she is aided in their complete annihilation by a Sergio Leone-esque combination of some fortuitous explosives, the re-appearance of a companion thought dead, and a murderous row that erupts among various factions of the villainous horde, leaving Azumi and Bijomaru to face off in the Japanese equivalent of a Main Street showdown.

  One of Azumi's rare moments of peace, as Azumi comforts, and is comforted by, the girlfriend of the recently departed Hyuga...

In Azumi, Ryuhei Kitamura fashioned, (with only his second film) a classic quest/adventure tale which, with its ‘very youthful hero who must grow up fast’, and its moments of unsettling darkness, echoes another recent way-better-than-might-have-been-expected minor genre classic, Takashi Miike’s The Great Yokai War. But while Miike’s emotional depth was leavened with an impish, playful and satirical wit, Azumi derives its resonance from the pattern of loss that is interspersed, mantra-like, throughout the riveting action sequences: The never-explained loss of Azumi’s mother, the youngsters’ loss of innocence as they are consumed with their duty and their task, Hyuga’s loss of life itself as he violates the warrior code by becoming attached to Hiei, and, perhaps most tellingly, Azumi’s loss of her own ideals as she sacrifices her vision of a life of peace and her own gentle inner nature to her warrior destiny. The fact that Kitamura is able to give his film these unexpected shadings without ever sacrificing the kinetic flow of one of the best samurai swordplay flicks ever, is testament to a new talent well worth watching, and Azumi has found an audience among both Otaku fanboys as well as admirers of just plain, good old-fashioned moviemaking.