A Film a Week - Sisam / Sisamu

 previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

It is a piece of public knowledge that the Japanese master filmmaker Akira Kurosawa inspired the Hollywood filmmakers from John Sturges (“The Magnificent Seven”, 1960, was basically a re-contextualized remake of “Seven Samurai”) to George Lucas whose original “Star Wars” (1977) was “The Hidden Fortress” (1957) in space. Just as well, Kurosawa himself was inspired by the literature coming from the West, from Shakespeare to the Russian classics, and s lot of his work is based on their writings.

Once again, the western world comes back as an inspiration for a Japanese filmmaker, but this time in the form of Kevin Costner’s “Dances with Wolves” (1990) which got a Japanese “reading” from the scriptwriter Masaya Ozaki and the director Hiroyuki Nakao with “Sisam”. After the national premiere in mid-September, the film was selected for Hawaii International Film Festival where it has the international premiere.

Hokaido, Edo period. Matsumae clan prospers from the trade with the indigenous Ainu people. Kojiro (Kanichiro Sato) is the younger son of the late clan retainer and he is getting ready to assume his first samurai duty at the trading post where his older brother Einosuke (Takahiro Miura) already serves. The post is supposedly peaceful, although Kojiro senses that their business is not exactly a fair trade. One night, Einosuke catches the clan servant Zensuke (Masato Wada) in the warehouse acting like a spy or a thief and gets mortally wounded in the altercation. Kojiro swears to avenge his brother and promptly gets to the action, tracks Zensuke down, but also gets wounded in combat with him.

He is found by the Ainu locals and gets nursed back to health in the house of the village chieftain. Kojiro learns the new language, culture and the way of life, while also finding out the scope of the Yamato colonization of the Ainu lands, the danger the new gold-mining trade poses to the salmon-bearing rivers and his own clan’s dirty role in it. The day of reckoning is approaching and our hero has to choose between the samurai code and the loyalty to the people who saved his life…

The title “Sisam” comes from the Ainu-language term for the neighbour, which also defines the principal topic of the film, whether the tolerance between the peoples is possible in the colonial and exploitative framework. Although it verbally takes the strong anti-colonial stance, Nakao’s film is more easily translatable to the American 90s westerns with its “benevolent exoticism” towards the natives, while never drifting too far away from the hero and its journey of moral dilemma towards the goal of realization.

On the other hand, the director Nakao matches the components of a “small movie” (such as pretty basic locations, Miki Ogawa’s largely hand-held camerawork and natural lighting) with a sense of spectacle. For the latter, the kudos go to the production designer Kei Itsutsuji, the costume designer Tsuyoshi Takahashi and especially to the composers Nobuko Toda and Kazuma Jinnouchi whose fully orchestral score brings the sense of an epic.

Acting-wise, there is a bit of phoniness here, which is expected from such historical spectacles with a broad take. However, to the actors’ defence, it is not their fault, since the script is not exactly rich in the terms of the depth of the characters, with only a couple noble exceptions like Zensuke and the Ainu widow Rikianno, but their motivational complexity is introduced mainly to serve the plot and its twists. Kanichiro Sato certainly has the star power to carry the load of the troubled hero-in-the-making, but he also tends to act in broad strokes which sometimes results in over-expressiveness.

In the end, “Sisam” is a solid, competently made piece of filmmaking, but not exactly a masterpiece. However, the merits it will be judged by the audiences lie somewhere else, in its setting and its topic, so it could serve as a conversation-starter about Japan’s imperial and colonial past.