Azumi

Ryuhei Kitamura's samurai film Azumi delivers the blood and gut goods. From beginning to end, we're treated to bloodthirsty bitchin' battles, the confusing samurai ethical code, and mellow, strained guitar riffs, that come across as a mix between the soundtrack for Y tu Mama Tambien and a subdued Joe Satriani. The music is occasionally vexing but unyielding in the development of its aesthetic. Azumi (Aya Ueto) is discovered by samurai master Gessai (Yoshio Harada) as a young girl, after her mother has died, and she is subsequently trained with 9 other youths to become elite assassins. Their training is idyllic: they grow up in a pastoral paradise, aliens to town or even village life, consumed by their samurai commitment, unaware of their mission to come. Master Gessai is training them to kill warlords before they plunge Japan into another bloody civil conflict; Gessai was provided with this task at the end of the Battle of Sekigahara, a particularly brutal affair that led both Gessai and his master to devote their lives to ending such bloodbaths ahead of time. But before Gessai can begin beginning to end such conflicts, he needs to prepare his young students for the conflict awaiting them, and, consequently, orders them to pair up with their best friend in a fight to the death, the winners possessing the iron constitution necessary to cleanse Japan of its warlike virulence. This death battle is a little difficult to take and leaves an unsettling feeling in the viewer, especially near the end when Azumi herself squares off against the effete killing machine Bigomaru Mogami (Joe Odagiri), amidst a contingency of corpses (that closely resembles that from Sekigahara, a scene which provides Azumi with the same ethical concerns found within Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch or Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia). Was it better to kill off five elite warriors hours before heading out on their first assignment, better than taking them along on the mission where their presence would have likely had positive results? This question haunts Azumi's background and provides its ethical dimension with a strong examination of what it means to be a hero.