BUNRAKU Review
[With Guy Moshe's Bunraku hitting VOD in the US today we re-visit our previous review from the film's Toronto International Film Festival premiere.]
Wildly ambitious and visually inventive, Guy Moshe's Bunraku plays like the bastard child of Seijun Suzuki and the Wachowski Brothers with a dose of A Clockwork Orange, a dash of classic movie musical, a healthy portion of film noir and a moderate splash of video game and comic culture thrown in. Moshe is clearly aiming high which makes it a bit hard to be too critical of the film for not achieving its lofty goals but the simple fact is that the disparate influences struggle to mesh together and the film suffers from following so close behind Scott Pilgrim Versus The World - a picture that does a much more satisfying job of melding comics, kung fu, musical and video game cultures.There's no doubt at all that parts of Bunraku work remarkably well but those parts are unfortunately scattered throughout a film that often labors when it should soar.
The setting is the far future, the world has gone nuclear and to prevent a second apocalypse the surviving cultures have enforced a strict ban on firearms, moving violence back to the fist and blade and leaving the strongest to dominate. And one small town is well and thoroughly dominated by the Woodcutter, Nikola - played by a dreadlocked Ron Perlman - and his gang of deadly killers led by Trainspotting and Grey's Anatomy star Kevin McKidd. Nikola and his gang beat of challengers with ease and if anyone is ever to overthrow his oppression, help is going to have to come from outside.
Cue two strangers on a train. Josh Hartnett - who should play nothing but noir inflected characters like this for the rest of his life, the man was built for this stuff - is a nameless, gunless cowboy with fists of steel on a quest for revenge while Japanese pop star Gackt is a swordless samurai named Yoshi on a quest to retrieve an ancient medallion passed through generations of his family. Helped by a mysterious bartender (Woody Harrelson) the two will join forces to acheive their common goal of bringing Nikola down.
Of the two key influences, the Suzuki is the most immediately apparent. Theatrical in the extreme, Bunraku is one of the most heavily art designed English language films made in decades. There is no attempt at hiding the artificiality of the sets here, instead Moshe and his team revel in it, liberally applying color and messing with proportions to create an eye popping alternate world. Thge Wachowski influence comes in the form of appropriated cultures and philosophies reworked into a pop culture stew driven by a steady stream of martial arts action sequences. This is a gorgeous film to look at, every corner of every frame filled with something to look at or someone doing something incredible.
On the doing incredible things front, credit definitely deserves to be given to fight choreographer Larnell Stovall (Undisputed 3), who also has a small recurring part in the film which allows him to show off his own martial arts skills. Stovall works miracles with his cast - particularly Hartnett and Gackt - who are both completely believable as fighters and while the difference between the real fighters brought in to flesh out Nikola's team of killers and the fighters Stovall trained up specifically for this film can be felt the gap between them is a narrow one. Each of the fighters is given a uniquely different style - Hartnett employing only his fists, Gackt a more typical samurai style, and McKidd something completely unique that seems to draw from stage musicals and A Clockwork Orange as much as any traditional martial art - which gives the action a good range of variety. Despite the prevalence of the fighting nothing is repeated.
On the acting front everyone is similarly strong - Hartnett, Gackt and the scene chewing McKidd in particular - with only Demi Moore seeming to have difficulty finding her stride. In her defense Moore is never given all that much to do but, still, she never quite seems to be living within her own skin in this one.
So if acting, action and design are all strong, then where is the problem. At its most basic level the issue that that the different elements never really fuse comfortably together, leaving Bunraku feeling like several different films competing with each other on screen and some actors in one film while others are in a different one. Things just don't connect. Making this more apparent is Moshe's over-reliance on narration - which is omnipresent and often points out events that are perfectly apparent - and visual tricks that seem designed to say "Look at me! This is cool!" It would have been much better ff he just backed off and let the world live on its own terms as the constant interruption and redirection breaks the flow and pops the audience out of this meticulously constructed place rather than helping them sink farther into it. Also not helping is a script that takes a too ironic, too self aware tone while also putting some awfully clumsy lines into every one of the characters' mouths at some point or another.
The individual ingredients of Bunraku are pretty remarkable and there are loads of individual moments and individual aspects of the film to admire and even love. But those moments never quite come together into a satisfying whole, leaving the film feeling like somewhat less than the sum of its parts.
Wildly ambitious and visually inventive, Guy Moshe's Bunraku plays like the bastard child of Seijun Suzuki and the Wachowski Brothers with a dose of A Clockwork Orange, a dash of classic movie musical, a healthy portion of film noir and a moderate splash of video game and comic culture thrown in. Moshe is clearly aiming high which makes it a bit hard to be too critical of the film for not achieving its lofty goals but the simple fact is that the disparate influences struggle to mesh together and the film suffers from following so close behind Scott Pilgrim Versus The World - a picture that does a much more satisfying job of melding comics, kung fu, musical and video game cultures.There's no doubt at all that parts of Bunraku work remarkably well but those parts are unfortunately scattered throughout a film that often labors when it should soar.
The setting is the far future, the world has gone nuclear and to prevent a second apocalypse the surviving cultures have enforced a strict ban on firearms, moving violence back to the fist and blade and leaving the strongest to dominate. And one small town is well and thoroughly dominated by the Woodcutter, Nikola - played by a dreadlocked Ron Perlman - and his gang of deadly killers led by Trainspotting and Grey's Anatomy star Kevin McKidd. Nikola and his gang beat of challengers with ease and if anyone is ever to overthrow his oppression, help is going to have to come from outside.
Cue two strangers on a train. Josh Hartnett - who should play nothing but noir inflected characters like this for the rest of his life, the man was built for this stuff - is a nameless, gunless cowboy with fists of steel on a quest for revenge while Japanese pop star Gackt is a swordless samurai named Yoshi on a quest to retrieve an ancient medallion passed through generations of his family. Helped by a mysterious bartender (Woody Harrelson) the two will join forces to acheive their common goal of bringing Nikola down.
Of the two key influences, the Suzuki is the most immediately apparent. Theatrical in the extreme, Bunraku is one of the most heavily art designed English language films made in decades. There is no attempt at hiding the artificiality of the sets here, instead Moshe and his team revel in it, liberally applying color and messing with proportions to create an eye popping alternate world. Thge Wachowski influence comes in the form of appropriated cultures and philosophies reworked into a pop culture stew driven by a steady stream of martial arts action sequences. This is a gorgeous film to look at, every corner of every frame filled with something to look at or someone doing something incredible.
On the doing incredible things front, credit definitely deserves to be given to fight choreographer Larnell Stovall (Undisputed 3), who also has a small recurring part in the film which allows him to show off his own martial arts skills. Stovall works miracles with his cast - particularly Hartnett and Gackt - who are both completely believable as fighters and while the difference between the real fighters brought in to flesh out Nikola's team of killers and the fighters Stovall trained up specifically for this film can be felt the gap between them is a narrow one. Each of the fighters is given a uniquely different style - Hartnett employing only his fists, Gackt a more typical samurai style, and McKidd something completely unique that seems to draw from stage musicals and A Clockwork Orange as much as any traditional martial art - which gives the action a good range of variety. Despite the prevalence of the fighting nothing is repeated.
On the acting front everyone is similarly strong - Hartnett, Gackt and the scene chewing McKidd in particular - with only Demi Moore seeming to have difficulty finding her stride. In her defense Moore is never given all that much to do but, still, she never quite seems to be living within her own skin in this one.
So if acting, action and design are all strong, then where is the problem. At its most basic level the issue that that the different elements never really fuse comfortably together, leaving Bunraku feeling like several different films competing with each other on screen and some actors in one film while others are in a different one. Things just don't connect. Making this more apparent is Moshe's over-reliance on narration - which is omnipresent and often points out events that are perfectly apparent - and visual tricks that seem designed to say "Look at me! This is cool!" It would have been much better ff he just backed off and let the world live on its own terms as the constant interruption and redirection breaks the flow and pops the audience out of this meticulously constructed place rather than helping them sink farther into it. Also not helping is a script that takes a too ironic, too self aware tone while also putting some awfully clumsy lines into every one of the characters' mouths at some point or another.
The individual ingredients of Bunraku are pretty remarkable and there are loads of individual moments and individual aspects of the film to admire and even love. But those moments never quite come together into a satisfying whole, leaving the film feeling like somewhat less than the sum of its parts.
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