Zatoichi (2003)

Takeshi Kitano was approached by others to make this film, and he has said as much, which explains the unusual sight of a director subordinating his own temperament to the demands of pure entertainment. The result is a jidaigeki revival that moves with the efficiency of a well-honed blade: a blind masseur wanders into a village, a yakuza protection racket squeezes the townspeople, and two geisha siblings nurse a decade-old grievance about their murdered parents. Kitano shoots the violence with digital arterial spray and stages the whole thing to Keiichi Suzuki's percussion, which thumps along like a second heartbeat. It is a machine built for pleasure, and it works.

What it is not, and this deserves saying plainly in an age that reads sermons into everything, is a vessel for contemporary social messaging. The cast is entirely Japanese, as the Edo-period setting requires. One of the geisha siblings is revealed to be a man in disguise, a device as old as the revenge tragedy itself, deployed here to complicate a vendetta and nothing more. Zatoichi's blindness is a physical condition that governs how he fights and how he is underestimated. It is not framed as advocacy, nor as metaphor. The yakuza's extortion is the genre's standard engine of conflict, not an indictment of markets. The farmer O-ume and her gambling nephew exist to give the wandering swordsman somewhere to rest his feet.

The film closes with a tap dance number performed by The Stripes, an eruption of anachronism that most directors would not dare, and Kitano follows it with his hero tripping over a rock and observing that even with his eyes wide open he can see nothing. That is the register here: mischief, craft, and a punchline. Nothing is being taught. Nobody is being corrected. The picture won the Silver Lion at Venice for direction, which suggests the festival's jury understood what it was looking at. A film can be serious about swordplay and unserious about everything else. This one is.