Harakiri
1962
****
Director: Masaki Kobayashi
Cast: Tatsuya Nakadai, Akira Ishihama, Shima Iwashita, Tetsurō Tamba, Masao Mishima, Ichirō Nakatani, Kei Satō, Yoshio Inaba, Hisashi Igawa, Seiji Miyaguchi
In 1630, a rōnin requests a permission to commit ritual suicide within the walls of the Iyi Clan estate, just as another desperate man did some time earlier. Over the course of the next two hours, we gradually discover how the two men were connected. Masaki Kobayashi's slow-burning but powerful drama exposes the emptiness of institutional honour and the cruelty of formal tradition. The black-and-white cinematography is superb, and the story about samurai hypocrisy is terrific, even if this is not a particularly dynamic film; much of it consists of men sitting and talking. Based on Yasuhiko Takiguchi's 1959 novel Ibun rōnin-ki .
