Out of all the screening copies we receive, Der Samurai is one of the best.
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| "Make fun of my dress, prepare to die." |
Imagine the distant cool of Jean-Pierre Melville
starring a German Toshiro Mifune filtered through the androgyny and
homoeroticism of Rainer Werner Fassbender and you have a rough idea of the
stage set in Till Kleinert’s surreal fantasy action thriller, Der Samurai.
Among the strangest yet most skillful
reworking of the samurai myth since Nagisa Oshima’s mutually gay themed samurai
epic Taboo with overtones of the
horror genre, Der Samurai concerns a
cop named Jakob who is called into a village to investigate a series of wolf
attacks only to come face to face with an androgynous sword wielding maniac in
a woman’s white dress. As the old saying
goes, heads will indeed roll, just not in the manner you’d expect. Only the Germans can turn transvestitism into something quite formidable and violent.
A loose metaphor for unleashing repressed urges with
Freudian overtones, Der Samurai feels
like Gregg Araki on acid. Watching the
film, I kept thinking back to The Doom
Generation’s Xavier with his long blond hair and omnisexuality whenever Der Samurai’s transvestite slasher
appeared onscreen. Playing freely with
elements of the horror genre, the myth of the hero, sexual awakening and even a
bit of the werewolf subgenre, this is the kind of movie that takes familiar
ideas and rearranges them in a discomfiting yet unique fashion. Unfolding much like a hallucinogenic
nightmare, the film is a visually breathtaking head trip shot with rich colors
and augmented by the largely nighttime setting, allowing the cross dressing
adversary to amorphously blend in and out of the dark.
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| "I just wanted to pitch a tent." |
That said, Der
Samurai is far from perfect, with some of the acting and setups showing off
their occasionally amateurish production values. There were also times when Ryuhei Kitamura’s Versus came into mind, showing by the
same token just how much you can do in terms of action with so little in the
bank account. While not for everyone and
clearly slanted towards the gay persuasion and more open minded cinemagoers, Der Samurai is an inventive retelling of
the samurai myth that actually does manage to intimidate and make one’s blood
run cold. Who would have thought the
bizarre sight of a fully grown man in a woman’s dress decapitating his fellow
humans right and left could be so terrifying and yet so fascinating at the same
time?
-Andrew Kotwicki