Assassination

1863, Japan. American warships are off the coast, the shogunate is shaking, and the imperial party and the shogun's party are killing each other. Hachiro Kiyokawa emerges in the middle of this. Who he is stays unclear: one day he works for the shogunate, the next he appears on the emperor's side. Nobody knows what he wants, and for that reason everybody fears him. The film does not narrate the man directly; it assembles him out of what people who knew him say, out of flashbacks and out of accounts that do not match. Masahiro Shinoda directs the Japanese film; a hundred and four minutes, with Tetsuro Tamba as Kiyokawa and Eiji Okada and Shima Iwashita in the cast. Shinoda was one of the Japanese new wave directors. It moves in the shape of a swordfighting picture, but its real question is whether what a person actually is can be established at all.