Serdar | Genji Press

Every truly great movie I have ever seen has, in some way, been about the human face. Bergman considered the human face to be the one true subject of all cinema, and made dozens of films about that one subject. Even a film as removed from individual people as Koyaanisqatsi has many shots where we simply stare at other people and realize there is nothing quite as alien as another person. Shinya Tsukamoto’s Vital is about life and death, but also the serene face of Tadanobu Asano, one of Japan’s most remarkable living actors because he suggests more when holding back than most people do when emoting. His face in this movie is a mask behind which a great abyss waits, and there are moments where he prods at his own face as if wanting to pull it off. Is there anything in there?

Asano plays Hiroshi, a young man who wakes up with no memory of his life after a car accident. His parents are patient and gentle, and prod him towards something that meant a great deal to him before the crash — a burgeoning interest in medicine. He enrolls in medical school and buries himself in his studies, not as a way of escaping his past but perhaps as a way of rediscovering it by proxy. One semester he sits down with a group of other students to dissect human cadavers, and discovers something hauntingly familiar about the corpse he’s about to dismantle. This was Ryoko, a girl he once loved.

A Time to Live and a Time to Die is the first movie I have seen by Taiwanese director Hsiao-Hsien Hou, and if it turns out to be the best he will ever make I won’t be surprised. Hou’s film has been compared to masterpieces like Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story, but even if it had not been I would have probably drawn such parallels on my own. It is a quiet, contemplative movie, and it only gradually reveals itself to be about things so large and sad that this might be the only way to make a movie about them. Like another Taiwanese director I have come to admire, Ming-Liang Tsai (Rebels of the Neon God), Hou explains little and shows all we need to know, and we come away feeling that no explaining is needed.

The film draws directly on Hou’s life, and almost by accident becomes a portrait of the lives of many people like him — expatriates from the Chinese mainland who came to Taiwan, settled there to find a better life, and found that but also felt a terrible sense of loss and dislocation that being among their own family could not dispel. Hou himself was born in Kwangtung, and went along with the rest of his family when his father pulled up roots to seek prosperity after WWII. The film opens with them already settled in Taiwan, but Hou’s father has asthma, and they are compelled to relocate from the urban Hsinchu to the more backwater Fengshan in the south.

The first shot of Harakiri is not of a human face but an empty suit of ancestral armor — a perfect visual metaphor for the emptiness and inhumanity of the codes of honor upheld by feudal Japan’s ruling classes. The camera moves down corridors and through antechambers, all equally devoid of people: there are no human lives here, just symbols. In such an environment it is all too easy for tyranny and cruelty to flourish, and only a matter of course that the codes of the samurai would become mere façades.

Harakiri (or Seppuku) takes its title, as some of you have probably determined by now, from the name of the suicide ritual used by samurai to save face when defeated or disgraced. It was not, as has been mistakenly believed, something that had its roots in Japan’s pre-feudal history. Seppuku was devised by the samurai to keep their own people in line, and to provide a spectacular way of death so that the condemned could be exemplified. A condemned man who was given the opportunity to kill himself in this fashion could be redeemed in the eyes of others, and since feudal Japan didn’t believe in second chances, that was about as good as you could expect to get.