Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I write to you from the midst of a furious thunderstorm, which I’m hoping will at some point calm down enough for me to get on with some apartment hunting. But whether I am swept away by the torrential rains of August or not, I will at least have left you all with another collection of ramshackle film reviews. This week our cinematic journey carried us from a heartbreaking classic to the latest One Piece film, with a couple unexpected detours along the way. We’ve also been churning our way through Dragon Ball Z Kai, and in the process discovering that if you pare down the original Z’s interminable pacing, the show’s actually pretty darn fun. I’ll likely have more coherent words on that next week, but for now, let’s check out some films!
First up this week was Sansho the Bailiff, a renowned Japanese film about the unfortunate children of an eleventh century governor. After their father is deposed for being too soft on his subjects, his children Anju and Zushio are separated from their mother by slave traders, and eventually sold to the tyrannical Sansho. The two are forced to endure years of harsh labor under their oppressor, with Zushio eventually hardening his heart to the suffering around him, while Anju holds on to the faint hope of reuniting with their mother.
Sansho the Bailiff is a relentlessly somber film, demonstrating the true face of both human cruelty and our capacity for indifference to such cruelty. There is little joy and less charity to be found in the lives of Anju and Zushio; their suffering is realized in one carefully choreographed long take after another, the camera evoking formal beauty and cold impartiality at once. As such, the few scraps of kindness and dignity that do glimmer in this darkness are all the more precious: a sympathetic word, a shared heel of bread, and the familiar weight of their father’s Goddess of Mercy, a statue carrying his final words of “even if you are hard on yourself, be merciful to others.”
Between these rare gifts, Anju and Zushio are provided the barest of possible means to escape their station. When Zushio falls into callousness, finding it less painful than hope, it is his sister Anju who reminds him of how the breeze felt when they were last with their mother. When he is nearly captured by Sansho during a desperate escape attempt, it is the one man who was kind to them, now a Buddhist monk, who shelters him. The film’s most noble characters are incapable of coexisting with the cruelty of their society; whether through retreat into a holy temple or self-destruction, kindness must be kept from the world if it is to truly endure.
The film never settles for easy moral takeaways, and suffers no illusions as to whether Sansho is a unique evil – in fact, even when Zushio regains favor with the government, he is still less valued than a productive monster like Sansho. Like his sister, it is only through the sacrifice of his new freedom that he is able to find justice or joy, in at least some partial and imperfect form. But in a world so free of idealistic sentimentality, how brightly those imperfect victories shine! Through the endurance of mercy in the face of such frank injustice, Sansho the Bailiff offers a rousing, mournful cry of human resistance, testifying that what is good in us can survive even the harshest of circumstances.
Our next feature was Saloum, a Senegalese western/horror mashup centered on three mercenaries known as Bangui’s Hyenas. After their plane goes down in the remote area of Sine-Saloum, the trio are forced to negotiate with the locals for supplies, posing as tourists to fit in among a remote vacation commune. However, the Hyenas’ leader Chaka has other business in this place, and his hunger for vengeance may end up putting his whole ramshackle family in danger.
I’d noted Saloum as a film to watch some time ago, and my housemate’s curiosity regarding traditional genre structures as portrayed across global cultures brought it to the top of my list. The film indeed provides an intriguing transposition of western and horror conceits; the winding rivers of Sine-Saloum offer an appropriately isolated stand-in for the untamed west, and lead Hyena Yann Gael adeptly switches between the worldly, genial “face” of his mercenary troop, and the steel smolder of his true feelings. The film’s first half feels like one continuous escalating standoff, as tensions rise and increasingly dangerous variables (this woman knows who you are! That guy’s a cop!) are thrown into the mix.
Saloum’s ultimate turn towards supernatural horror is necessary to bolster its narrative structure, but the transition nonetheless feels a little bumpy, and the second half can’t quite maintain the first’s vivid tension. That said, the film’s otherworldly threat is still a fine concept in its own right, and with strong performances across the board, Saloum is eminently recommendable on basically all of its technical merits. Fast-paced, tense, poignant, and beautiful, Saloum proved an altogether winning introduction to Senegalese cinema.
We then watched some absolute afternoon trash, a piece of Netflix refuse known as R.I.P.D. This seemingly direct-to-video feature improbably stars both Ryan Reynolds and Jeff Bridges, the first as a recently departed Boston cop, the second as an 18th century lawman who becomes Reynolds’ partner in the post-mortem police department (Rest In Police Department? Don’t think about it too much). What follows is a largely rote buddy cop film noteworthy mostly for its atrocious CG, with Ryan Reynolds playing the same character he always plays, and Jeff Bridges talking like an old prospector munching on a cheekful of marbles. Honestly, Bridges’ accent in this film was enough to carry me through it; the film has no actual merits, but it was a fine thing to half-watch while grinding out Tears of the Kingdom Koroks.
We finished out the week with One Piece: Film Red, the latest One Piece film, starring Shanks’ adopted daughter/pop idol Uta. From its title on down, the film was technically pitched as a vehicle for Red-Haired Shanks himself, but any fans of One Piece know how that goes: Oda has decided a little Shanks goes a long way (like, “little” as in three brief appearances, and “long way” as in twenty years of manga), and that holds true even for his feature film. Instead, this is the Uta story, as she hosts a never-ending concert in protest of the endless injustices of the pirate world.
Given the entire film takes place at that concert, and the Straw Hats spend most of their time as either willing or captive audience members, this is less of a traditional One Piece film than an idol film also starring the crew. Uta’s songs are fine enough, but if you’re looking for a fully realized adventure in the model of most One Piece films, you’ll likely be disappointed. And frankly, the songs’ visual accompaniments within this film are far less creative than the film’s collection of music videos, meaning if you’ve seen those, you’ve already witnessed the best Film Red has to offer. Given all that, Film Red mostly feels like a failed experiment, demonstrating that a proper One Piece film demands a level of focus on the actual crew that a musical about some film-original character cannot provide.
