re:mote voices

Title: When The Last Sword Is Drawn
Cast: Kiichi Nakai, Koichi Sato, Yui Natsukawa
Director: Yojiro Takita

When The Last Sword Is Drawn comes some months after the release of the similar film Twilight Samurai. Both working in the territory of the struggling samurai, particularly in a period of upheaval. Indeed both use similar techniques of balancing the aftermath of events, mixed with flashbacks to the story. While the predicament of the samurai in both films is similar, in that they both experience poverty, the big picture is different. As such that picture has more in common here to The Last Samurai, though thankfully this has no Tom Cruise, and concentrates more on the clash between Japanese factions and how this fits together on this cusp point of history.

The story starts in 1899, with an old man bringing his grandchild to a village doctor to get him to check out the boy’s fever. While there he spots a photograph of a samurai. This starts a series of flashbacks reflecting on the curious chemistry between this old man and the man in the photograph. The old man was an uptight and aloof samurai, living in the city and serving the shogun, who is appalled when he is greeted by the man in the photograph – a country bumpkin samurai, who is shaggy and too talkative, and just arrived to join up. The bumpkin causes a stir, gaining a reputation for being a money grubber, but this is down to the poverty that has driven him to the city and the need to support his family.

The story unfolds through a series of flashbacks to the 1860s, when the shogun and emperor’s forces were in mounting confrontation, and the old man and the doctor reflect on the two sides of the story. The basis of the flashbacks is a curious narrative method, and can lead to a certain confusion initially – especially when we get flashbacks within flashbacks. In the Twilight Samurai the story is pretty compact, and says what it has to within that frame, by contrast Last Sword is more sprawling, perhaps more epic – going for more battles, more geisha, and the like in the process. With that it loses something that Twilight Samurai has. In addition, Last Sword drags out a little too much, which can make the film feel longer than it is. Regardless Last Sword is still a decent film, the poor samurai is a particularly strong character, and the whole thing has a more authentic/striking feel that the Hollywood version in Last Samurai.