Fantasia 2024 Review: A SAMURAI IN TIME, A Time Traveling Swordsman Finds New Life As A Samurai TV Extra

Steeped in a combined sense of nostalgic whimsy and melancholy, Yasuda Jun'ichi’s A Samurai in Time serves up a comedic fish-out-of-water tale of an Edo-period warrior magically transplanted to the present day and the challenges he faces as he tries to adapt to a world that becomes less familiar with every passing moment.

It’s a dark and stormy night when Shinzaemon Kosaka (Yamaguchi Makiya) and Kazami Kyoichiro (Fuke Norimasa) face off on the mean streets of medieval Kyoto. Shinzaemon is a pro-shogunate samurai determined to vanquish his political rival, but just as their swords begin to clash, a burst of lightning strikes and he is knocked out. When he awakens moments later, he’s still on the Kyoto streets, but something is different. He now finds himself in the present day, wandering around the set of a modern jidaigeki (period film) TV series, where almost everyone looks like him, but they are surrounded by strange people wearing blue jeans, headsets, and sporting cell phones.

Shinzaemon is understandably confused by his predicament, but when ambitious assistant director Yuko (Sakura Yuno) finds him wandering around, she immediately puts him to work as one of the extras on the studio’s hit series. His skill with a sword comes in handy as he is conscripted into service as a kirareyaku, an extra who specializes in being killed on screen. He soon finds comfort in this one aspect of modern living while the world around him remains confounding, but when he is confronted by a blast from the ancient past, he has to decide if he is going to continue living for today or settle a three-hundred-year-old score.

Much like 2014’s Uzumasa Limelight, to whose late star – Fukumoto Seizo – this film is dedicated, A Samurai in Time is a melancholic celebration of the dying art of jidaigeki cinema. As the form becomes more and more rare, kirareyaku and the various specialists whose careers depend on these period films find themselves struggling to make ends meet, this is personified in Shinzaemon’s struggle to keep a handle on a world that is literally unrecognizable to him.

Yamaguchi, a twenty-five-year veteran of film and TV, sells the despondence of a man for whom the world makes little sense. His genial relationship with Yuko and her determination to rise above her station as an assistant to finally take the director’s chair in her own project provides him with the inspiration he needs to seek a path toward a productive life, working in jidaigeki, performing acts of drama that he once knew as his day-to-day struggle to survive.

A Samurai in Time is the kind of low key but intensely felt comedy that Japan has become very good at over the years. There’s not a lot of fancy footwork here – apart from the frequent sword fights, naturally – but it’s not an action film, it is a character study, and we learn though Shinzaemon about the importance of acceptance and making the best of what we have in front of us. Yasuda’s direction is assured but not flashy, and his writing combined with solid performances from Yamaguchi and Fuke make this film a crowd friendly winner that is sure to put smiles on faces as it gathers an audience in the coming months.