A subversion of the Ronin archetype, Miike's familiar themes of family ties and displacement are strapped to a more streamlined drama formalism which fully maintains his penchant for bloodshed and nihilism. Miike's second feature sees the prolific filmmaker embrace a more conventional narrative framework while maintaining his penchant for focusing on those who exist on the periphery of society, with this film telling the story of a disgraced Japanese assassin stranded in Taiwan who conducts low-grade work for a lower-level Taiwanese crime boss. Miike doesn't feel particularly interested in normative notions of family but the epistemological experience of what it can provide, and through this stoic characterization resting at the fulcrum of this story he unearths an understated story of family, one in which this ronin attempts to construct something real out of the gallows of his day-to-day existence. Miike's response to the Taiwanese New Wave in some respects in that it shares several core themes related to diaspora, identity and familial dissonance associated within, yet it remains distinctly his grim, the film's bloody conclusion representing the cyclical nature of violence, the familial ties, and underlying emotions related to displacement and identity which effectively keep humanity in a perpetual state of violence.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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