In the Flesh: Unforgiven (2013)

Lee Sang-il's Unforgiven, an adaptation of Clint Eastwood’s classic revisionist Western set in Hokkaido at the start of the Meiji period, begins in the snow. The line between life and death is the edge of a sword, blood drooled from gaping wounds across the powdery white, glimpses of horrific violence held at the screen’s edge and in the unfocused background. The first proof of violence we see clearly is the mutilated face of Natsume (Shiori Kutsuna), a young prostitute slashed by a John for laughing at the sight of his penis. Lee positions the camera directly above the prostrate woman, surrounded by her fellow sex workers and writhing in agony as they tend to her wounds. Even more so than Eastwood’s original, Lee’s film is about the ties that bind outsiders to the sites of their own abuse and humiliation, the price “civilization” demands of those at its margins in exchange for the arbitrary protection of its laws.

The prostitutes and the indigenous Ainu form the emotional and moral core of the film, anchoring its deconstruction of the concept of heroic violence. As Jubei (Ken Watanabe) and Kingo’s (Akira Emoto) world continues to collapse, these outsider figures move closer to the center of events. The point of transition occurs after Jubei is beaten nearly to death by local police commander Ichizo Oishi (Kōichi Satō) and wakes up three days later in the care of Natsume and her fellow whores, asking unselfconsciously “Do I look like you now?” as he feels his scarred face. His pretensions to having left the violence of his old life behind to honor his late wife, a peaceful Ainu woman, cannot survive even proximity to murder. As soon as violence touches him, he reclaims his former identity and dissolves as a human being. In the film’s final moments he vanishes completely, his sole gift to the woman whose honor he fought for and the young half-Ainu man, Goro (Yūya Yagira), he failed as a mentor the empty husk of his failed life as a farmer.

Satō is the film’s weakest link, both for the one-dimensional menace with which he plays Oishi (adapted from Gene Hackman’s much richer turn as Little Bill in the original film) and for the script’s decision to trim away his character’s life and work. Still, his final line is crushing and the fight between Oishi and Jubei is so boldly and brutally choreographed it plays almost like something out of The Raid, as much drunken brawl as sword fight. Smartly juxtaposed with an earlier scene in which Goro kills a man in a protracted struggle in an outhouse and is badly traumatized by the experience, the horror of Jubei’s desensitization to violence lands with a force many finger-wagging movies trying to have their blood-drenched cake and eat it too struggle to approach. As Jubei rides out of town in the shadow of a raging fire, clouds of smoking whipped by the wind off of the crumbling beams of the whorehouse, the sense is not that his story has come full circle but that he has fallen out of it completely. Our last glimpse of the one-time samurai returns us to the snow, to that white void where life is reduced to bitter animal struggle. He has picked up his sword again and cut himself out of the world.