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Taboo [2001] (REGION 1) (NTSC)


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A very Shallow Script
Review date: 2008-02-26 Rating: 4 out of 10

I bought this film with great anticipation, having seen a clip of the sword fights in the first scene. The photography and the fight co-ordination were so authentic and beautiful. The rest of the script however is amateurish. Except his other works say otherwise, I find absolutely no reason for the hype around the director of this film. The plot is meaningless, the characters remain shallow. Everyone in the film seems deluded. Plotlines are started and killed off without explanation. There is for example the new deputy commander who seems to be plotting something with his bullish atitude, but he suddenly has no part in the film. Is the story about the affair between Kano and Taisho? Taisho barely features in the film! Is Kano gay or not? Does he have a plan or is he just a confused, blood-thirsty teenager? He is playing the group against each other, but with no objective. This is like an incompetent artist, scribbling on canvass and calling it abstract art. Abstract art is done by the untalented, and applauded by the completely bewildered! Don't watch this when you are sober. It makes no sense!

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Reviews


Taboo's Taboo
Review date: 2007-09-03 Rating: 10 out of 10

The Shinsengumi samurai, a kind of Freicorps (or voluntary militia) in Kyoto are recruiting new young men to join their elite ranks. They have to be efficient, ruthless, fast and focused.

Sozaburo Kano at 19 has all of the requirements, but what makes him even more lethally dangerous is that he is bishounen - a 'pretty boy'. This teenager ignites lust and also distrust in his comrades and the leaders, questioning whether this pretty boy image doesn't hide some steely interior.

The film is as much thriller as action movie, using the issue of homosexuality within military ranks, as leitmotif for the search of the killer on the loose in Kyoto. The relationships between young and old and among the rank and file is amply expored. Due to it homosexual underscore though it is more liklely that concerns of our times are addressed than those of the 19th century.

There are some excellent samurai fight scenes, and a kind of freshness of wonder guides us through the scenes, discovering the cherry blossoms are the plucked cherries of youth and innocence. The film employs symbolic scenes and means, such as the colours (white is the colour of death in Japan - Kano wears white, a dusting of snow is seen on the grounds), etc.

Excellent entertainment and informative too.




A subtle, unsettling, beautiful film by Nagisa Oshima
Review date: 2007-08-15 Rating: 8 out of 10

"A gorgeously filmed study of homosexual lust" wrote one reviewer, and dumber words by a film critic have yet to be written. Taboo is a meditative study, broken by bouts of intense but not flashy sword combat, of what happens when a disruptive element enters the closed, hyper-macho world of a military unit.

It's Kyoto in 1865. The old social and economic order imposed on Japan by the Tokugawa shogunate is slowly atrophying. The Shunsen-gumi is an elite samurai unit, one of several, whose job it is to maintain order for the shogun. Recruitment has been difficult, and now candidates are accepted, after rigorous trials, from the merchant class. The troop is ruled by rigid hierarchy, a code of conduct which is unforgiving and a demand for loyalty which cannot be questioned. The troop's captain is Toshizo Hijikata (Beat Takeshi); his lieutenant is Soji Okita (Shinji Takeda).

Sozaburo Kano (Ryuhei Matsuda) is the 18-year-old son of a wealthy merchant whose family at one time had been samurai. He proves to be an outstanding candidate in sword combat and is accepted, along with one other, Hyozo Tashiro (Tadanobu Asano). Kano is, no other word will do, beautiful, with a pale, oval face, limpid eyes and full, cupid lips. He is not effeminate, but he is a feminine dream some men will lust for. He also is without apparent emotion. He perhaps is aware of the effect he has, and he is passive in the face of the sexual tension he creates. Passion among men in the military is as old, or older, as the Egyptian charioteers, the Greek hoplites, down to modern armies. The samurai accepted this as a fact of life, something without consequence as long as discipline, order and duty prevail. Kano's feminine beauty and his passivity create tensions among this cloistered group of warriors, who have no wars to fight. This leads to ambiguous actions, assumptions and death.

The film serves as a cool commentary on the relationships among these men, from the two samurai who profess their love directly to Kano and implore him to let them have him, to Beat Takeshi's Captain Hijikata, who is wise and a little bemused by Kano. Hijikata may not, as he puts it, "be that way," but he finds that he and the other officers are a little more gentle with Kano than they might be with others. Kano himself, in most regards, does not react to those who want him carnally. When he allows himself to be used once, he might as well have been in another room for all the response he gives. If he doesn't react to others' lust, neither does he seem moved by killing or death. Ordered to behead in a ritual execution a samurai who broke the code of behavior, Kano does so without hesitation and as efficiently as if he were butchering a pig.

What motivates Kano? We are never sure. At the end of the movie, when Kano is ordered by his superiors to fight and kill the fellow samurai who has been judged a murderer, we find ourselves with doubts, just as Captain Hijikata realizes he has doubts. Perhaps it's as simple as the answer Kano gave to an officer who asked him, "Why does a rich man's son join the militia?" Kano answered, "To have the right to kill."

Beat Takeshi does an excellent job as the captain of the troop. He brings a subtle glimpse of comedy now and then to the role, but now and then also a questioning look at Kano. As Takeshi Kitano he has written and directed any number of hard-boiled, macho yakuza movies. His casting is effective and unusual. Roger Ebert wrote, "Imagine John Wayne in "Red River," with a stirring beneath his chaps every time he looks at Montgomery Clift." This a great image but it doesn't convey the subtleties of the situation. The movie wouldn't work, however, without Ryuhei Matsuda. He looks at times like an Utamaro print. What is surprising is that he was just 15 when Nagisa Oshima cast him in the the part; it was his first acting role.

Oshima, who directed that other beautiful and perverse movie, In the Realm of the Senses, has created a film which is elegant and a feast for the eye. It sets it's own, deliberate pace. It's wonderfully photographed, whether in winter or in spring, whether in the streets of Kyoto or in the barracks of the troop. This may not be a movie for everyone, but if you approach it with an open mind -- and not as a "gorgeously filmed study of homosexual lust" -- I think you'll be rewarded.

The DVD picture is excellent. There are no significant extras.

Not so much a review as some notes for viewers.
Review date: 2006-03-15 Rating: 8 out of 10

I watched this movie some time ago and was fairly baffled. Since then I have learned something about the Shinsengumi, so when I watched it again recently it all made a lot more sense.
Some points which might be helpful -
• The Shinsengumi was not a training school for samurai; it was a sort of vigilante police force in Kyoto, dedicated to maintaining law and order and supporting the Shogun. See When the Last Sword Is Drawn for a more conventional view of them.
• The Ikadaya incident, mentioned briefly, was when the Shinsengumi raided an inn and massacred the Ishin Shishi, the anti-shogunate forces from Choshu meeting there; a bloody, violent event, but it did prevent the Choshu men from carrying out their plan to capture the Emperor and burn down the city of Kyoto!
• Apart from Kano and Tashiro the characters are based on actual people, members of the Shinsengumi, who are well known in Japan. They appear in manga stories, a TV series starring young pop singers, and numerous feature films. For a Japanese audience there would be no need to explain who they are and their circumstances. For example, in one scene the Vice-Commander Hijikata (Beat Takeshi’s character) goes to talk to Okita Souji, who is sitting by the lake. He wants to ask him about the swordsmanship of the new recruits, but he starts by asking him, very tenderly, how he is feeling. Okita looks at him without speaking for a few moments, then replies cheerfully that he’s feeling fine. In fact he is slowly dying of tuberculosis, but this is never mentioned; you are expected to know it.
• Kano is the only character who wears white. White is the colour of death in Japanese tradition.
The ending is baffling. It's meant to be. Don't worry about it.
Nothing wrong with the subtitles on my copy, by the way.

Missing Subtitles
Review date: 2006-02-02 Rating: 2 out of 10

Unfortunately for anyone not fluent in Japanese this film will be a visual only experience . The lack of adequade subtitles makes the film a worthless rental.

Product Details/Specifications


Actor(s):
Tadanobu Asano
Koji Matoba
Ryuhei Matsuda
Shinji Takeda
Takeshi Kitano

Creators:
Takeshi Kitano (Primary Contributor)
Ryuhei Matsuda (Primary Contributor)
Nagisa Oshima (Writer)
Eiko Oshima (Producer)
Ichirô Yamamoto (Producer)
Jean Labadie (Producer)
Jeremy Thomas (Producer)
Kazuo Shimizu (Producer)
Ryotaro Shiba (Writer)

Director(s):

Recording label: New Yorker Video
Manufacturer: New Yorker Video
EAN: 9781567302660
Binding: DVD
ISBN: 1567302661
Number of items: 1
Format: Colour, DVD-Video, Widescreen, NTSC,
Release date: 2002-08-20
Universal product code (UPC): 717119791247
Region code: 1
Running time: 100 minutes
Theatrical release date: 2000
Language: English (Original Language)

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