Then one day a sniper’s bullet wounds Shingen from a distance, and over the course of several days he ails and finally dies. His brother and the other chancellors of the kingdom decide to use the double to delude everyone—not just Shingen’s enemies, but his friends, his advisors, his family, his grandchildren, his concubines, everyone—into thinking the warlord is alive and well. Whatever changes he shows, they reason, can be attributed to illness, or the ravages of war. What they find most startling is that the double can not only emulate Shingen’s appearance, but his attitude, his demeanor, and maybe even his wisdom and prescience as well.

And that is exactly the problem. As tempting as it would be to believe that this double could be Shingen, it is not. The double has his own failings, his own limitations and greed and shortsightedness, and at some point any one of those things will betray him, and them with him. It is inevitable. They tell him that he only needs to pretend to be Shingen for three years, just long enough (they believe) to win the war and settle everything stemming from Shingen’s death. But it is not possible to insulate him against their own arrogance and ambition—or his, for that matter. And sure enough, there comes a moment when the mask slips, and everything comes crashing down.

A lesser movie, I think, would have been happy to be about the mechanics of the double passing for Shingen, something akin to The Prisoner of Zenda. Kagemusha is more explicitly ambitious and philosophical: it’s not even really about the kagemusha, but about how his importance is ultimately illusory in every sense. He is surrounded by the symbols of the warlord’s power—his castle, his armies, his right-hand men, his young heir—but he cannot have any of it, or even make proper use of it, and that torments him. Was it really worse to have lived as a common thief, without the hypocrisy of being a pretender to power? Once he tastes what the life of a double has to offer, though, he finds himself drawn most not to promises of power, but to his “grandson,” the only one of the bunch he genuinely cares about. (He, and the old warlord’s horse, are the only two outsiders who see through the deception.)

Under this there is another layer of meaning, one that may be far too nihilistic for most people to swallow. Human values, as much as we are loathe to admit it, are highly arbitrary; we value things for their appearances, not their true nature. Men bind themselves together based on the appreciation of such delusions, and when the delusion is shattered everything collapses. The double is aware of this, at least partly, but his awareness is to no avail. At one point he becomes sick of the whole thing and tries to confess to his concubines, but they do not believe him—or maybe they do, and their laugher is just a way of preserving the outward lie. When the double’s handlers see that their fake Shingen can be just as persuasive as the real man ever was, they are terrified: If such a thing is possible, then what else is? Surely they can command power if he can. But they are not capable of sustaining the same illusion that he can, and it ruins them.

Kagemusha marked a return to glory for its director, Akira Kurosawa, one of the greatest of directors who nevertheless had been long out of favor in his own country for decades. After making Red Beard in 1965, he found to his dismay that he was considered old-fashioned, and did not work again for almost five years. He tried to start an independent production group with three other directors, and the resulting film (Dodesukaden) bankrupted the company and failed to find an audience. An attempt to work for 20th-Century Fox on Tora! Tora! Tora! ended with him leaving because of gross creative differences (legend had it he did his best to get himself fired). He attempted suicide, but survived, and then made the keenly beautiful Dersu Uzala in Russia. Then two men he’d inspired indirectly through his earlier work—Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas—learned of his plight and arranged to help co-finance a project he’d been contemplating for a long time but could not find backing for.

That project was Kagemusha, and on its release it reawakened Japan (and the rest of the world) to Kurosawa’s talent. He was still not able to find solid backing in Japan for his work, but financiers in France helped co-produce Ran, another masterwork he had been planning for years. In both cases, he’d storyboarded the films by creating hundreds of beautiful Chagall-esque paintings to depict each scene. This he did despite suffering from failing eyesight that forced him to frame most shots with the help of an assistant. In Kagemusha he gives us masses of men in formation, their individuality subsumed into their function, or distant shots of men alone in a world that seems to have abandoned them entirely. He also gives us the sad, vacant eyes of Tatsuya Nakadai, who also played the half-mad lord in Ran (as well as the murderous samurai of Sword of Doom).

Kurosawa’s deteriorating vision seems to have had, strangely, a liberating effect on his filmmaking. Early in his career he strove for realism and matter-of-factness, but Kagemusha is awash in dreamy, often lurid colors and bold symbolic imagery. In one startling sequence, the double dreams of the embalmed corpse of Shingen rising from his grave—not to give chase, but to abandon the other man in a great wasteland. The design for this scene calls to mind the synthetic fantasy images Kurosawa created for Dreams and Ran as well. It’s quite obviously shot on a soundstage, but it’s so striking to look at it hardly matters.

What most people, myself included, remember most about Kagemusha and Ran are not the grand battle scenes but the small, quiet moments that are even more heartbreaking. There is a scene near the end of this film that never fails to wound me. It comes when the impostor has been unmasked, and is being banished into the wilderness with only the clothes on his back and letters of recommendation. It is raining, and while the guard at the gate has an umbrella he does not offer it to him, but instead he and his cronies line up and throw rocks at the impostor to drive him off. (Kurosawa revisited this idea endlessly throughout his career: that of society closing ranks to crush the individual, for the sake of preserving a greater order.)

Come to think of it, Kurosawa was an expert at embodying all his movie’s themes in some aspect of their presentation. The concluding scene involves an opposing army using a team of gunners to shoot Shingen’s men’s horses out from under them. The way it is shot and edited, however, we never see most of the battle; we see the guns going off, Shingen’s men reacting with horror, but never the carnage itself. Then Kurosawa gives us lingering, static shots of the dead and dying on the battlefield, both men and animals alike. We go straight from the living to the dead with no steps in between, and we are denied (quite deliberately) any sense that this slaughter was worth it.

The last phase of Kurosawa’s career consisted of two kinds of movies: wistful and gentle fantasies like Rhapsody in August or Dreams, and the death-suffused gazing-into-the-abyss of Kagemusha and Ran. In a way, however, both of them are very much alike: they are products of a man determined to see beyond the surface of life and into the true nature of things, be it lovely of terrible. He finds both great loveliness and great terror here, and maybe even great truth as well.