A glorious, suspenseful film told in flashback, Harakiri delivers a potent and gut-wrenching ethical message that has lost none of its thrust, released though it was more than fifty years ago, and dealing with subject matter dating to the early seventeenth century of the Edo period. It is a samurai film, a storied “jidaigeki” with critical acclaim; but it is also a coup de grâce delivered to the outmoded Bushido-way-of-life, so honorable to those with unbending principles that it becomes hypocrisy and an excuse for the cruel mistreatment of others. The historical distance of the film magnifies, rather than reduces, the timeliness of the issue of merciless, inflexible ideologies: not…
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In long shot, supine in his apartment at 6:00 p.m., Jef Costello lies in bed with a cigarette whose smoke plumes into the window light. Punctuated by the chirps of a bullfinch in a cage, the portentous quietude of the room prevails until a quote of the samurai’s code appears onscreen, reading as follows: “There is no greater solitude than that of the samurai, unless it is that of the tiger in the jungle…perhaps…” The final word of that quote is a knowing gesture of the director, Jean-Pierre Melville, who fabricates both the quote and the book, “Bushido”, to which he attributes it; the quote sets the tone of a…
