Passion projects like Kubi almost always deserve greater appreciation and more careful interest than a mere evaluation of their qualitative values can merit. Takeshi Kitano has been mulling over the concept for his historical adaptation of the Honnō-ji incident for around 30 years — a true lifelong passion project. Entire sub-genres and cinematic universes have come and gone in the time that Kitano has been trying to make his complicated samurai epic, and for that film to finally arrive, a carefully directed opus with a preposterous abundance of artistic intentionality behind it, viewers would be wise to allow Kitano’s vision to overwhelm them as thoroughly as possible. Then and only then can one properly evaluate and appreciate such a passion.
Set right after Lord Oda Nobunaga (Ryo Kase) tries to unite Japan and the subsequent rebellion and disappearance of vassal Araki Murashige (Kenichi Endo), Kubi drops us into a chaotic world with too many rulers, too many allegiances, and too many lovers. New leaders come and go as late as 90 minutes into the two-hour film, forefronting the chaotic atmosphere that Oda was trying to tame in the first place. Even to an audience more literate in Japanese history, the sheer amount of who’s-who and backstabbing may still (intentionally so) confound first-time viewers. The same-sex love triangle between Oda, Araki, and Akechi Mitsuhide (Hidetoshi Nishijima) adds a little steam to the orgy of violence, and offers even more allegiances to be broken and manipulated.
Kubi arrives a year after Zhang Yimou’s Full River Red, another tonally playful historical epic from East Asia with enough backstabbing and betrayal to induce whiplash. (That film gradually and effortlessly evolves from the outright silly into something more profound, and it’s a better movie for it; the myriad tones in Kitano’s film are more like a stew: omnipresent.) Unlike Zhang’s superior film, Kitano’s film moves in and out of absurdist comedy, dark drama, and a measure of mystery within the same scene. None of Japan’s leaders end up looking particularly heroic; instead, they end up throwing up while being carried across rivers because they can’t swim or impishly sit on the sidelines of battles, yelling at the soldiers like a drunk dad watching sports on television. The way Kubi makes a laughing stock of mythical national figures has few analogs in American cinema, if any.
The film’s first image, coming right after some opening text setting the scene in 1579 Osaka, features crabs or perhaps crawfish crawling out of the veiny, bloody neck of a decapitated corpse. It’s a fitting scene-setter for what follows. The Japanese word “kubi” means “neck,” and specifically refers to a basket for carrying heads no longer attached to bodies, and Kitano’s film has plenty of severed heads to go around — truly, the film certainly has to be near the top of the list for the most decapitations in a mainstream movie. Sometimes, these are quick and clean; at other times (more seldomly), the act of cutting off a head looks a bit like sawing a tree with a middling saw, and takes vigorous effort. But Kubi doesn’t just deliver a one-trick-pony of cleaved heads; all of the brutal violence found here will make weaker stomach turns — an early scene involving an apple, a sword, and an unexpected gay kiss is particularly innovative. The gritty, hyper-realist violence feels too modern, too post-Game of Thrones, to have been part of Kitano’s original vision 30 years ago, but it works to heighten the absurdity of the politics at play and even national destiny-making.
Conceivably also not part of the director’s original vision; roughly half of the characters here are gay, a change of pace for these sorts of samurai movies. At first, the charitable view of Kitano’s queer subject material would be that he’s taking the brotherly love inherent to the genre to its natural conclusion. But there’s more lust than love going around, and the limits of this interpretation are stretched rapidly. And one brief intended comedic sequence steers us toward an uglier interpretation, one that would see Kitano utilizing homosexuality to envision a morally backward world. The scene involves a soldier running from a trans prostitute and screaming that she is really a man; in a line meant to produce chuckles, she yells back, “I’m just a whore with a stick.” Blink and you’ll miss this scene, but it just might be the key to the film’s grasp on queerness: a symbol of Japan’s moral depravity and national confusion. The critique of Japanese histories present throughout denies any and all patriotic metanarratives, and that, combined with the sheer amount of craftsmanship on display, keeps Kubi intriguing. It’s just a shame, and a stain on the film, that the arrival of a distorted Japan comes by weaponizing queer sexualities.
