Far Eastwood: Japan remakes Hollywood

Laziness is the wicked stepmother of reinvention. Why else would Spike Lee unnecessarily remake Oldboy a mere ten years after Park Chan-wook’s classic? And, be assured, it is the film he retreads, not the source manga. Are subtitles so very difficult, or do Asian stars not shine brightly enough for western audiences? Then again, not all updates have such idle intent; I suppose it’s the subtle difference between regurgitation and reimagination. Only James Toback and other lunatics would hold his Fingers above Jacques Audiard’s stunning Parisian retelling, The Beat That My Heart Skipped. Even Michael Mann must admit that his L.A. Takedown is far surpassed by... erm... Michael Mann’s own upgrade Heat. So what then of Unforgiven, a brave Japanese remodelling of Clint Eastwood’s Oscar winner? Well, this particular strand of cross-pollination has pedigree.  

Toshiro Mifune and Charles Bronson's square-up in Red Sun (1971) sounded the death rattle of the mixed marriage between cowboys and samurai (ye gods, imagine the sex... Brokeback Bushido). As with all relationships, however, it began so beautifully: The Seven Samurai was plundered and retuned as The Magnificent Seven; Yojimbo got a wonderfully garish Italian paint job by Leone (A Fistful of Dollars); then Walter Hill’s later, lesser Last Man Standing – reheated spaghetti. It works both ways, though, as Kurosawa’s original influence for Yojimbo was Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 high plains novel Red Harvest.

The problem is that with the cultural carpet bagging of opportunistic remakes, subtext is stripped out. The much maligned J-Horror genre, at least in its early flush of youth with such fine shockers as Dark Water and The Ring, mined the loneliness and isolation of modern Japanese life, the breakdown of the family unit and tradition. Their US doppelgängers proved hollow likenesses, offering up simple frights. Those of higher purpose and design, such as the aforementioned Audiard, often apply their own cultural significance to create something fresh and original. When I spoke to Bong Joon-ho at last year’s Edinburgh film festival of the rumoured American remake of his matinee monster tale The Host, he pondered over a possible adapted significance: “Maybe monsters from Mississippi? Some black family or something? Morgan Freeman as Grandfather. Will Smith? I don’t know. It’s up to them.” 

The feedback to Lee Sang-il’s Unforgiven remake has been positive, placing him in that preferred mould of reimagination. A quick concurrent synopsis: an aged gunslinger/samurai of fearsome repute is brought out of retirement by the promise of a thousand dollar/yen bounty for the shooting/slashing of the men who disfigured a prostitute. So while the story moves a continent, from Wyoming plains to Hokkaido hills, and involves a selection of tailored subplot, the transfer is easy; gunslingers and samurai are cut from the same cloth. They are lone wolves, working within codes of honour and, in a characteristic shared more specifically between the spaghetti westerns and Japanese chanbara (samurai film), possessing an almost magical talent for death. The only variant is bullet or blade.

While Red Sun may have killed this particular pairing, it’s been resurrected in recent years: once with that constant cult reanimator Tarantino cameoing in Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django (2007). A year later saw Korean Kim Jee-woon’s title tribute The Good, the Bad and the Weird. Now at GFF in 2014 it’s Unforgiven. I’ll be watching for sure, for the rumoured beauty of the cinematography, for Eastwood from an Asian perspective (will they skewer the chanbara swordplay myth as he did the wild west?), but more specifically to see samurai great Ken Watanabe (who also starred in Clint’s Letters from Iwo Jima) translate his William Munny, the elder interpretation of the man with no name; the circle of legend complete. “It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. Take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have.” Remaking his classic? That might just be forgiven.