Kubi

Set during a period of Japanese history in which the country was trapped in an almost constant state of civil war, Takeshi Kitano's latest, Kubi (or Neck), is a darkly comic period piece that charts the rise and fall of several scheming warlords. Originally conceived back in the early 1990s, in tandem with Kitano's commercially unsuccessful (at least at the domestic box office) Sonatine, Kubi works a similar sort of genre-dismantling magic. Just as Kitano drained the heroism, anti or otherwise, out of hardboiled cop and organised crime films, Kubi similarly refuses to venerate its historical figures, lasering in on their selfishness or self-absorption and how the depressed permissiveness central to samurai chivalry allowed that mania to then be transmitted out onto a quivering nation. Although the cast stretches into the dozens, with each person's name and standing announced by an onscreen scrawl, Kitano largely focuses on three main, competing camps: those of Ryo Kase's Nobunaga Oda, Hidetoshi Nishijima's Akechi Mitsuhide, and Kitano's Hashiba Hideyoshi. 

Kase's Nobunaga is completely demented, the Great Unifier of Japan portrayed as a swaggering gangster who plays his subordinates off against each other with promises of succession while he plots with his children to plunge the country into an even deeper level of chaos. Rarely seen without an entourage that includes Jun Soejima's Yasuke, a Portuguese-speaking African who knows when to cut and run, Nobunaga conducts himself as an object of great, physical desire. When he deigns to touch his inferiors it is, very often, calamitous. In one instance Nobunaga demands one of his generals chew on his blade (not a euphemism) before Oda forces his tongue into their bloody, ruined mouth. These strange demands for supplication are a constant in Kubi, a film that depicts a society where lives are constantly under threat, often condemned in casual or even flippant ways. Even a character like Mitsuhide, nominally heroic because he defies his bloodthirsty monarch and houses Kenichi Endo's fugitive Murashige, uses his social inferiors as expendable playthings. Before he spends the night in Murashige's arms, Mitsuhide strolls his grounds, blasting condemned men with a matchlock rifle, the act positioned as a curious form of foreplay between these two samurai. 

Lastly, there's the actor credited as Beat Takeshi. His ageing Hideyoshi is a great, swollen bully who cackles in shadow while his rivals tearfully sign their own death warrants. Referred to as Monkey by Nobunaga, either for his curious countenance or the impatient, mischievous way he presents himself, Hideyoshi is actually the Daimyo's biggest rival largely thanks to one of his lieutenants, Tadanobu Asano's Kanbei, who comfortably runs rings around the other, creakier lords. Kitano's minimalist approach to portraying Hideyoshi is key to extracting enjoyment from Kubi: as an actor, Kitano has a magnetic pull based largely around his casualness or indifference to the harrowing strife that surrounds him. This aspect of his performance has only deepened with age, as Kitano has grown larger (at least in this role) and even less mobile. Hideyoshi, who frequently makes reference to his beginnings as part of the peasant class, isn't constrained by the same circuitous logics of pride and propriety that cage his suffocating peers. The studied ceremonies of the people he has infiltrated are actually physically excruciating for him, largely because a great deal of it is premised on extended displays of suicidal etiquette. He finds it all just plain boring. Kitano, a comedic actor through and through, approaches each new, outrageous development as a hassle rather than a calamity. Despite the (comfortably) hundreds of lives violently extinguished over the course of Kubi's runtime, Hideyoshi views all of the film's churning developments as the latest wrinkle in some ongoing cosmic joke aimed squarely at him.