movie reviews

Sukiyaki Western Django

With his hat lowered and boots dusty, a lone drifter moseys through the dry brush of a Nevada town. Hand on his gun, he eyes down an unruly posse of hoodlums. The wind blows, shots ring out, and the violence begins. This may sound like a traditional Western, but for visionary (and hallucinatory) Japanese director Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django, the similarities to the age-old genre end here. Instead, Miike’s Western includes a cadre of Japanese actors, a hybridized Asian/American landscape populated by dojo-like saloons, and a theatrical gang battle of glam-punk ruffians. Like sukiyaki, the jumbled Japanese soup, the film teems with disparate and delicious flavors.

The story is as complex as sukiyaki’s taste. The Red and White clans have holed up in a desolate town and battled themselves to near extinction. When a fast-shooting gunslinger shows up, they each try to recruit him to end their war forever. But he is the lonesome cowboy—he don’t stay nowhere for long—and reignites a cataclysmic feud between the clans. As the action cools, we are served sukyaki Shakespeare, as the few women of the town are caught in star-crossed love under the fire of magnificently staged shootouts. Though Samurai swords clash with bullets—Samurais were Japan’s cultural equivalent to the rough riding outlaw—the fight scenes are not the floating dances of Hong Kong cinema. Sukiyaki’s rapscallions retired the karate kicks for good ol’ fashioned American brawls.

Sukiyaki Western Django pays homage to midnight movies and Spaghetti Westerns, most notably Sergio Corbucci’s ultra violent Django (1966), but also to Western culture entirely. In each allusion to Shakespeare and Rambo, Sukiyaki reveals a distinctly Asian look at (and appropriation of) American and Western culture. The English dialogue is delivered by Japanese actors, who don’t originally speak the language, placing a musical cadence onto familiar phrases traditionally found in Westerns. “Y’all,” “skivvies,” and “reckon” find new meaning when uttered from a Japanese mouth. Many of the actors phonetically sounded out the words, and ultimately make a never-before-heard dialect that only exists in Miike’s West.

The broken English is just another twist of the genre—not to mention outlaws who wield Samurai swords like six-shooters and wayfarers with didgeridoos instead of harmonicas—but it all makes sense if you choose to play Miike’s game. And make no mistake, in Miike’s world you’re with it or against it.

In a preamble to the action, Miike admirer Quentin Tarantino introduces the film (almost as a warning: Abandon all hope of normalcy ye who enter here) as a pancho-wearing cowpoke, stirring sukiyaki on a two-dimensional set of Mt. Fuji and a blood orange sunset, while telling the yarn of the battle of the Reds and Whites. But this is not a Tarantino movie and certainly not just another Kill Bill sequel. Instead, Sukiyaki is a post-punk rock Western and a stylishly fun jolt of life kicked into the dusty genre’s world.

—Drew Tewksbury
09.15.08

Related posts:

1. Red
2. The making of ‘Inglourious Basterds’
3. Two Fingers – S/T
4. Anton Corbijn
5. Spectacular Summer Film Fests

© 2008 Drew Tewksbury: Multimedia Journalist.