Film Description
| SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO | ||
| Director: | Takashi Miike |  |
| Country: | Japan | |
| Year: | 2007 | |
| Language: | English | |
| Runtime: | 121 minutes | |
| Rating: | 18A | |
| Principal Cast: | Hideaki Ito, Koichi Sato, Yusuke Iseya, Teruyuki Kagawa, Masanobu Ando, Quentin Tarantino | |
| Trailer: | View the trailer for this film | |
| SCREENING TIMES | |||
| Saturday, November 15 | 9:00 PM | Palace Cinemas | |
Desert winds blow through a bleak and desolate town. Death pervades the atmosphere as crows peck at hanging corpses. A mysterious stranger (Hideaki Ito) arrives in the middle of a bloody feud between two clans over a fortune in hidden gold. This familiar premise gets blasted away in cult-cinema bad-boy Takashi Miike's audacious cross-cultural mashup.
While its immediate influence appears to be Sergio Leone, Sukiyaki Western Django takes its primary inspiration from the surreal and bloody shoot-'em-up Django by director Sergio Corbucci - often referred to as "the other Sergio." Miike slices and dices the genre with an Americana-kabuki-baroque style: Buddhist temples sit alongside saloons, samurai swords hang from gun belts, and sake flows with blood.
The villains of this operatic struggle, the Heike Reds and the Genji Whites, are decked out in an ornate fusion of East and West, their brocaded dusters and Stetsons resembling a Japanese glam band on the run - call them Miike Gold Dust and the Cowpokes from Mars. With each side headed by crazed charismatic leaders, the warfare hits a peak of absurdity when the boss of the Reds forces his followers to read Shakespeare and insists they call him "Hen-Ray." In an effort to make sense of the town, our protagonist learns the stories of citizens living in fear of the lunatics and killers: a devoted wife turned into a whoring widow; a love child produced from a Red and White tryst; an injury-resistant sheriff; and a town matriarch with a secret.
Sukiyaki Western Django goes on record as being Miike's first English-language feature film, though with a twist - the Japanese cast speak English, but an oddly phonetic version of it. Miike adds his characteristic visual bravado to the mix and casts director Quentin Tarantino - a self-professed fan of spaghetti westerns - in a small role as a gunslinger.
Tighten your saddlebags, load your revolvers, pack your chopsticks and join Miike for an outrageous wagon ride into the wild, wild East.
Colin Geddes
© 2007 Toronto International Film Festival Group
