A Samurai in Time
In the Edo period, Shinzaemon Kosaka (Makiya Yamaguchi), a supporter of the Shogunate, crosses swords with Yamgata (Ken Shonozaki), an advocate of the Meiji Restoration, and the fight is struck by lightning. Kosaka finds himself transported into the future, long after his side has lost the struggle, and is bewildered on the set of a jidaigeki TV show where he is mistaken for an extra in a samurai soap opera.
He falls in with a kindly temple priest (Yoshiharu Fukuda) and ambitious assistant director Yuko (Yuno Sakura), who generally believe his eccentricity is down to amnesia … he is astonished by the miracle of edible but affordable sweets and profoundly moved by television drama, then joins with a screen sensei (Rantaro Mine) who educates him in the honourable profession of losing fights to heroes in TV shows and getting repeatedly, bloodlessly dismebowelled. However, lingering issues from his own time refracted through the slowing-down even of historical dramas based on the clan wars incline the taciturn Kosaka to melancholy … and when big star Kazami (Norimasa Fuke) selects him to be the antagonist in his comeback The Last Real Samurai, it seems that battling with bamboo swords will eventually pall and these warriors won’t settle for anything less than real steel.
Written and directed by Jun’ichi Yasuda, A Samurai in Time is not a fish-out-of-water comedy or an action movie – those bases have already been covered by SwordKill and The Iceman Cometh – but a mostly contemplative, hesitant vision which addresses the divisions stirred up in goodies-vs-baddies drama and deals with a hero who has to square up to the fact that history says his side lost badly. It seldom takes the obvious approach and is oddly focused on Kosaka’s interior struggles – he can’t even get into sweet rom-com mode with the interesting Yuko until he’s worked out how he feels about his miraculous survival – and the constant, repeated small-scale street fights (this isn’t about epic sweep historical films but the bread-and-butter version) in which lone good guys see off three baddies at a time. It has wry humour – as when Kosaka tries to die using the style of kabuki acting from his own period – but is bittersweet rather than laugh-out-loud.
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