BUNRAKU: TORONTO FILM SCENE REVIEW

BUNRAKU feels like a movie that a lot of filmmakers have been trying to make for a very, very long time. What makes the film work, where others have failed, is that it takes a very simple premise – seeking revenge on the guy at the top – and filters that through very complex, diverse and beautiful art forms on top of intricate and exciting fight sequences.

Amongst BUNRAKU’s early buzz from the filmmakers and programmers, much has been made of the film’s “pop-up-book” aesthetic. But on an artistic level, and certainly an art direction level, the film goes way beyond just that one gimmick. It adeptly borrows from and pays homage to artistic styles ranging from comic book panels and scale modeling to early Soviet animation, without being beholden to any one in particular.

The decision was a conscious one for director Guy Moshe. He’s seen films play tricks with backgrounds before and the one thing he wanted to avoid was action playing over top a flat background. Creating a 360-degree film space, he said in the film’s Q&A period, was essential to the look of the film. And it does make the film look good, while giving the fight choreography the proper dimensions and room it needs to keep the action and the story moving. In one of the more impressive sequences, Josh Hartnett’s drifter enters a club (“the Russian roulette”) through the revolving chamber of a pistol only to walk into a room that actually looks like it’s been made to scale out of cardboard.

The whole idea of the film, of course, comes from the Japanese tradition of bunraku, or puppet theatre. Moshe cleverly dances around this idea on several levels. The largest fight sequences have elements of marionettes, seeing fighters fall in a heap as soon as they’re struck down. The pop-up aesthetic makes the figures stand out against their backgrounds as though they are cardboard cut-out puppets, before the action draws the audience into the 360 reality of Moshe’s world.

But the best allusion of them all comes when Woody Harrelson’s barkeep is addressing Gackt’s samurai and Hartnett’s drifter after they’ve had an epic one-on-one. He makes Russian-doll-style puppets of both and informs them that every story needs heroes, even if they are caricatures of their roles. The samurai immediately scoffs, to which Harrelson chirps “what, don’t want to be just a paper tiger?”

In the end, BUNRAKU stylizes a very simple premise. It’s one that gets repeated a few times in the script: “There’s always someone more powerful than you.” By keeping that element simple, while changing the look to another stunning tableau before the audience can get too comfortable inside Moshe’s world, the film never stalls on the audience, keeping them always engaged in the story. I’d also like to personally thank Moshe for introducing some interesting gimmicks along the way without relying on them to keep my interest.

BUNRAKU may not be the type of film that permeates its Midnight Madness stigma and reaches the mass festival audience, but what it has going for it is an artistic appeal that resonates with all factions of the Madness realm (cult, martial arts, comedy, violence, etc.), and probably anyone under the age of about 40 that doesn’t mind sitting through a ten-plus minute fight sequence.

source: Toronto Film Scene