Me Too (2012)

Director: Aleksey Balabanov

Screenplay: Aleksey Balabanov

Cast: Aleksandr Mosin as Sanya; Oleg Garkusha as Oleg the musician; Yuriy Matveev as Yura Matveev; Alisa Shitikova as Alisa; Jurij Matveyev as Jura; Viktor Gorbunov as Jura's Father

Canon Fodder

 

It's easier to find work for your asshole.

[Major Plot Spoilers Throughout]

Aleksey Balabanov's last film as a director opens with one man killing four others at night with ease in the opening, yet switching to another figure collecting fir tree oil for a purpose, Me Too is a very unconventional film for Aleksey Balabanov's last. This is a reimagining of Stalker (1979­), Andrei Tarkovsky's legendary reinterpretation of Roadside Picnic (1972), the science fiction novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky he transferred into an abstract philosophical journey, very different from the exceptional source material itself, and one of the best sci-fi films ever made. Here in place of the Zone is the Bell Tower of Happiness, between Uglich and St. Petersberg, an environment affected by electromagnetic radiation that killed all the human beings, leaving the environment too in a permanent winter.

A band of male misfits - one gangster named Sanya (Aleksandr Mosin), a musician Oleg (Oleg Garkusha), Jura (Jurij Matveyev), who is an alcoholic sprung from a recovery clinic, and Jura's father (Viktor Gorbunov) - intend to travel to the Bell Tower, said to transport people far away, never to come back, to a better place. Among this band of misfits, also add Alisa (Alisa Shitikova), a sex worker fleeing from her life, originally a university student who could not get work in her desired field, ending up picked up and tagging along in this journey for a purpose. This interpretation is unlike Tarkovsky and Stalker in a lot of ways to avoid becoming plagiarism, in that this is a Balabanov in tone, including how like The Stoker (2010), there is a huge emphasis on music playing over long scenes of movie from locations, and in general, a very breezy tone in the first half when it is the road trip to get to the central location. Me Too is a curious finale to its director's career in terms of an abstract metaphorical journey, which is what makes it different from his other work,

Me Too too, whilst ultimate a sombre film, does challenge one last time as a Aleksey Balabanov production, as you have to contend with how Balabanov throughout his career had moments which are uncomfortable, forcing one to ask if he was challenging the viewer, believed this characters, or was deliberately attacking political correctness in a misinformed creative decision. It was something I have had to think about first since one line in Brother 2 (2000) was a jarring piece of dialogue that raised this question, and here it is our lead Sanya who is not a good person. In particular, one monologue which Balabanov stays on, will raise questions from viewers to why it is in the film, that about a gay club where he shot a gay man at, an unpleasant piece told by the character as a joke, and odd to even include. He also cruelly suggests to Alisa that the Bell Tower will not transport women unless naked, leading to her doing so in her own quest for a better life, revealed as as a joke when she meets them up again. Adding to this one character's racist streak, and these are not a likable group in some ways, but it is Sanja significantly who is going to put viewers off from the first half. That he is ultimately the central character will raise a question to what Balabanov's intentions are.

This is a challenge to get into, but as with Balabanov's cinema in general, in one hand he has this uncomfortable moments which raise concerns of his art, in the other he challenges this, as for the most part, everyone else but Sanja is not a horrible person, merely a miscreant who wishes for happiness, unable to find such and wishing to leave through the Bell Tower. Referring the 2012 doomsday conspiracy, these are lost people, Jura trying to even rationalise the world at one point by connecting God, Charles Darwin, aliens, dinosaurs and a mass of idiosyncratic takes on history at one point in front of a campfire, whilst Oleg is a Christian. Jura as the sole female character is a lost figure, absolutely sympathetic, wishing for more, and when they get to the outside of the "Zone", unlike Tarkovsky's which was guarding by the military, said military here blankly say that they are welcomed in. They do not care about another entering, as if the environment is an inconvenience they have to professional guard, only warning people who wish to traverse inside, like gatekeepers, which no one has ever returned.

This zone is strange and compelling from Aleksey Balabanov, truly closer to his earlier work when it is a frozen wilderness of abandoned buildings, where the animals have survived but there are corpses everywhere, including of those who wished to find the Bell Tower but were stuck. The Bell Tower is explicitly supernatural, and those who are accepted are turned into puffs of smoke out of the top. The film, challenging its problematic content of the first half, offers the ultimate of challenge when it is Sanja, out of them all, who is refused entry and stuck outside, wandering unsure of himself. It is explicit that his crimes as a criminal, a bandit, have prevented him from entering, and makes the uncomfortable actions and words of his from the first half more striking in that he is the refused a heaven.

It is also here Aleksey Balabanov's career ends with a befitting finale that adds more questions, before his premature death in 2013, where he himself makes a cameo as another refused into the Bell Tower. Playing a film director, poignantly he is the sole person left to console Sanja, as someone who is not transported and yet wants happiness. Though Sanja is indefensible as a character, when he is left lost you as the viewer are still stuck with having to see the world from this abandoned figure, likely to die in this Zone from the radiation. That as an image and finale, with its clear symbolic meaning, startles in what is suggests of everything, including the problematic moments of before.

It again evokes the nihilism of the director's work which undercut those moments disconcerting of his career, an acceptance that his characters were not likable, but still figures lost and stuck in a world. His take on Russia, his homeland, was bleak, and anything we as viewers were uncomfortable with also came in mind that he never glossed over this side of the country either, for good art or bad. If anything changed for the finale film, it is contrasted by a melancholia which, dare says it, is sympathetic for those not deserving sympathy, which is the most enigmatic of finales and a real provocation. It is a film that many will struggle with, for it is the final film for an artist, which are usually the most enigmatic of a creator's, the one which raises questions and causes divide. They are usually some of the most fascinating, and likewise Me Too is the case. Always the less well regarded or obscure, whether intended as the final film or not, these including outside of cinema tend to be the most unconventional and for me some of the most compelling. The journey with Aleksey Balabanov has been challenging, rewarding and is not yet finished, even in mind sadly his cinema is not readily available, including in how it is more complex with the films less readily available, but Me Too was a perfect final chapter in what it brought in terms of questions left asks and puzzles to consider.

War (2002)

 

Director: Aleksey Balabanov

Screenplay: Aleksey Balabanov

Cast: Aleksey Chadov as Ivan; Ian Kelly as John; Ingeborga Dapkunaite as Margaret; Sergey Bodrov as Captain Medvedev; Evklid Kyurdzidis as Ruslan; Giorgi Gurgulia as Aslan

Canon Fodder

 

[Full Plot Spoilers Throughout]

Out of all his films, Aleksey Balabanov's War is pretty accessible as a film, in which this will turn into a war rescue film about freeing the fiancée of a British couple from a Chechen warlord's military group. In mind to this however, the pre-credits sequence, involving a group of people (including the British couple, a man and a woman) being dragged into the camp as prisoners, you do however have Balabanov make an exclamation point of this being his type of cinema, not something easily digestible, when one of the prisoners has their head cut off and presented to their captors.

Ivan (Aleksey Chadov), a Russian soldier who starts the film as a prisoner here, narrates the film in the future of how, in the midst of the Second Chechen War, Ivan will help John (Ian Kelly) rescue his fiancée Margaret (Ingeborga Dapkunaite) from this group ran by Aslan (Giorgi Gurgulia). The immediate concern with the film, a more pulpy war film in the end, is how this treats this history, especially as the depiction of the Chechens within this film at first is very one-dimensional, capable of murder, death and a threat of sexual violence over Margaret. Balabanov was entirely interested in the issue, over how prisoners were treated and killed during this turbulent conflict¹, yet also has the Chechens played by actual Chechens, as the federals are actual soldiers and officials, and with scenes partially filmed in Chechen lands¹. Including the First Chechen War of 1994 to 1996, this is a history which feels it requires an entire text to go through, rather than try to sum real life conflict and death for a film review, but in mind to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russia, one would come to a production like War with a lot more caution of the message it wishes to tell, something which does have to be considered with not just a film like this, but also North American films or any from countries which paint a war with a likelihood of a simplistic black-white morality and jingoistic undercurrents. Aleksey Balabanov even if this was to be argued was the case here does however undercut this potential factor with an aspect that soaks through his films, even if unintentionally, that War is thankfully more complicated due to how cynical his worldview is. For all the concerns I have had with how Balabanov has included content and sentences spoken by his characters which are discomforting, a film which could be very nationalistic like War is a lot more cynical as it goes along even when it gets to the tropes of an action war film in the second half's rescue mission.

For starters bureaucracy procrastinates here even to help free Margaret or the prisonsers. This can be read with a very right wing, conservative message, this a Rambo film of two men, Ivan mainly, being a one-man army against Aslan's group, but War complicates itself, including the sense that any government body including Russia's is not reliable in the slightest for this mission imposed upon two people. At the same time, the negotiations John and Ivan, who is later brought in as a paid mercenary, to even begin this missions has to involve a Russian gangster trading heroine with Chechens. Aspects like this in the plot does mark to War's favour that this film, even if it plays as a pulpy war film, has a very misanthropic take on conflict, that this quest to rescue someone is marked by a lot of dirty business, by a lot of sides playing off each other, and Ivan not necessary a good person, just a young soldier who decides to go into this as a paid mercenary.

Ivan is not even hailing directly from Russia itself but from Tobolsk in Siberia, from an environment away from the central urban cities like Moscow, with its boats to travel about and small community in what we briefly see. Ivan is disconnected from civilian life, and for him, this mission he ends up with is part of what he can be, rather than pretending who he is not. Alongside the ending ultimately a cynical one, where he is talking of this mission from a prison cell charged for war crimes, he will continually tell John, who follows with him, that war is not heroic and even shooting bystanders, even by accident, is part of it. Considering bystanders, including women, accidentally are killed, once the rescue mission starts in Chechnya, emphasises Aleksey Balabanov not taking a noble viewpoint but something closer to his gangster films.

Not even John is noble either. Alongside the fact, off-screen, Margaret will have fallen in love with a wounded soldier she will be stuck with in a pit at Aslan's base, but John does not go into this mission with a nobility either. Channel 4, the British free-to-air public service television network, get a kicking as John is paid by them to film the rescue of his fiancée, strapping a camera to his head eventually and trivialising the life of Margaret. His act, which he films purposely as he goes along, is as much making this significant journey to save Margaret one for his financial benefit, eventually even getting a film adaptation in the epilogue to really dig in the lack of honour here.

Even if the Chechen characters are one dimensional, which is a critique worth having, Aleksey Balabanov also introduces Ruslan (Evklid Kyurdzidis) halfway through. A shepherd Ivan takes hostage, Ruslan is a begrudging ally even if forced to at gunpoint, and eventually even he complicates the black-white morality in that, due to tribal differences, even he is against Aslan and becomes a willing participant even if Ivan has been pretending he has soldiers threatening his family. This undercuts a simplistic take of painting the Chechen characters by having one who is likable and reveals Ivan's ruthlessness, arguably being more progressive even against what Balabanov may have intended because of his clear pessimistic ideals of human beings in general.  

It is a hell of a lot more worthwhile for Aleksey Balabanov to have this pessimism, because it at least means that, any concern one could have with the film, or a lot of content I have seen in his films, he yet was constantly undercutting it with a world weariness suggesting we were stuck with these figures trying to survive in a hostile society. He still has to be taken to task for the moments he had crossed a line into glamorising problematic characters, including ones spouting racist and homophobia ideas, but his nihilism even paints potentially glamorous characters with the same grimy brush, even Ivan here, more likable, stuck having to be a ruthless soldier to kill because he is stuck with no options aside from this. Far from self defeating and accepting it, it feels begrudging, especially as War is an action film eventually, one with the beats and energy of one that is exhilarating, but contrasts this with the punch line of the bookending narrative. That being that Ivan will not be celebrated, and even if not a good character, his role is proclaimed fully criminal by lies as much as what actually happened, with someone taking the fame from the moment. In many ways, whilst it can be read as a problematic message, a pro-lone wolf mentality, it feels instead like sod's law instead, befitting Aleksey Balabanov's worldview from the films before and only streaked with greater melancholy after this. War is, personally, not as meaningful a production in his career, clearly the biggest film in scope in his career, especially next to some of the smaller productions from this time, but it still has a lot to say.

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1) Aleksey Balabanov's film "War" is released in Russian cinemas, published on newsru.com on March 14th 2002.

Games of the Abstract: Fighters Megamix (1996)

 

Developer: Sega AM2

Publisher: Sega

One to Two Players

Sega Saturn / Windows

 

This begins with Virtual Fighter 3, a project that originally was meant to come to the Sega Saturn¹. In truth, you would have to wait, after its 1996 arcade release, for the 1998 version for the Sega Dreamcast, Sega's last console. Virtual Fighter's history with the Sega Saturn instead gave us a lot more than just the first 1993 game or Virtual Fighter 2 (1994). The Saturn conversion of the first game, which I have childhood memories playing, with fond memories of its blocky charm and jumps which caused the fighters to float in the air, ended up having a version called Virtual Fighter Remix, an improved version which was even given for free in the United States by mail. Virtual Fighter 2 was held with a better regard as a conversion, and is still held as one of the key titles to acquire for the console for retro gamers. There was also Virtual Fighter Kids (1996), but that is worth bringing up with Fighters Megamix itself.

Megamix is a crossover title, and among the beat-em-ups the Saturn got, specifically the three dimensional ones, this involves the cast of Virtual Fighter 1 to 2 against Fighting Vipers (1995). In contrast to Virtual Fighter being the technical fighting franchise of more realistic characters with different martial arts styles, Fighting Vipers is if someone watched Walter Hill's The Warriors (1979) and envisioned characters, from rock guitarists to teen male skateboarders, fighting each other in caged or walled rings with breakable body armour. This would not be the last time Sega flirting with this grungier concept, as the Saturn also got a conversion of Last Bronx (1996), but sadly, that was included among this roster, even if you had to factor in characters armed with weapons.

Fighters Megamix, to go for a lame rhyming reference, is a pick-a-mix game, precursor to the likes of the Super Smash Bros. series for Nintendo, in that this is a Virtual Fighters/Fighting Vipers crossover, but is famous in the modern day for its quirky cast of unlockable characters, a prototype for a Sega All-Stars brawler we sadly never got, as they decided racing could reference their past instead. There is not a lot to Fighters Megamix unless you get into the fighting mechanics, which is complex and interesting, but would expose me as being an absolute amateur with fighting games or explaining them, with no story to this game or sadly any ending texts for the cast. There is a campaign but it does not have a narrative as mentioned, instead a series of challenge brackets where, after six fighters, the finale one is always a secret to unlock. There is two player, Team Battle, a Survival Mode of trying to beat as many as you can with no replenishing health, and a training mode.

The lack of story, or even an ending for the characters is a disappointment, but the game has a lot of personality to compensate. The two different types of fighting game mechanics being options is part of this. Virtual Fighter is very technical and grounded, beyond that professional wrestling moves are completely practical in a fight, Fighting Vipers is scrappier, bringing in the walled fighting rings, which you can jump off and even dive on opponents, and armour, that certain moves (including ones the Virtual Fighters cast are provided) can damage the torso and lower half to the point it can be broken off eventually, leaving those characters more vulnerable. Made in mind to Virtual Fighter 3, moves given to characters here would exist for them in that game, showing how this has connective tissue for the pair.

Here is the most controversial statement I can make - as an outsider of fighting games, I find most traditional characters from them of the stoic male martial artists, Akira here to Ryu from Street Fighter, incredibly disinteresting to consider playing. Virtual Fighter in truth is too grounded in its cast for my tastes, these characters not meant to be exaggerated with the exceptional of Dural, usually the end boss who is a feminine figure made of liquid metal. They are shown through their martial arts style, and whilst this means some do have personalities, be it Lion Rafale, who in Virtual Fighter 2, as the French high scholar with a praying mantis style, was annoying for viewing anyone in their twenties as old, or Shun Di, an old man drunken kung fu fighter, my interest naturally gravitated to the Fighting Vipers cast, who all look like they could have been in an Italian post apocalypse film.

It is ironic the character I choose, the one who stood out the most, was Candy, known as Honey in Japan, the one character clearly meant sell on sex appeal as a cat-girl in a leather dress with a curvy figure, with end game images removed from the American Saturn release. She is meant to be sixteen in Fighting Vipers, which is creepy, but it says a lot of how much effort is put into these characters that she becomes even accidentally more interesting than this. She is still a fighter with a distinct look, who fights with cat paw swipes, and yet can vary between tickling people, diving off of walls onto them, and what can only be called "Thumps" in pro wrestling terminology, that being a flying backside strike so good it could knock a person through a brick wall and break all their armour off.

This all comes with the issue of how to view female characters designed by male designers, especially with those meant to be attractive and sexy, but this comes with a personal bias of mine that male characters in most fighting games are not interest to me, in that they tend to be incredibly bland to see, whilst female characters tend to have a lot of incredible work on them in costume design and physical personality, only contrasted by the monstrous and stranger entities you find in fighting games which are just as poured over in the best and weirdest examples. Fighters Megamix's legacy is based as much on its hidden characters, who are an eccentric bunch and also include nods to Sega's history, whilst even among the Fighter Vipers cast beyond Candy, they are still very grounded in their own context. This is mind to the fact that the cast, just from the female fighters, include Grace, another character I used, a fashion model who fights in rollerblades, or Jane, who is blatantly if you took the character of Jenette Vasquez from James Cameron's Aliens (1986), the female marine of the main team, and did not change a thing from the character played by Jenette Goldstein visually beyond avoiding a lawsuit.

The game's legacy, as mentioned repeatedly, is in the bonus characters, offering a potential beyond racing games that, if Sega ever returned to fighting games, offers an enticing look at their past. This was where Siba finally could be played for example, a Middle Eastern character who welded a scimitar that found his way in early Virtual Fighter prototypes², but was not included in the proper version. Virtual Fighter Kids, as also mentioned, was a quirky take on the game with big headed exaggerated versions of the cast, meant to be "kids", which has two members included here. Janet, a female cop from Sega's Virtual Cop light gun franchise, the first two released on the Saturn, is unlockable, and her movement would be that of Aoi Umenokoji, a character brought into Virtual Fighter 3. She is also a distinct character as a brawling female police officer, in body armour, one I also choose too to use and is one of the more rewarding unlockable figures to actually use.

There are some truly strange figures too. Even without being unlocked you can play Kumachan, a bear who does not even have animation, being a giant mascot statue on one stage which fights like a giant invisible hand of a child is playing fighting. Sadly, we never got Pepsiman, the star of the 1999 Playstation game and Japanese Pepsi mascot who was a bonus character in the Saturn release of Fighting Vipers, but we got Rent-a-Hero here, a character from Sega's 1991 Mega Drive game of the same name. This never got a Western release, a curious inclusion as, a regular Joe in working class superhero body armour, with a potential issue of his battery power being lost as he goes along. Sonic the Fighters (1996), an arcade only Sonic the Hedgehog tie-in, though announced for the Sega Saturn³, only became available from the 2000s onwards in console compilations or downloaded versions, and has two characters appear here. They are not Sonic, Tails or any of the key characters, instead a giant polar bear called Bark, and Bean, a green bomb throwing bird humanoid who references Sega's 1988 arcade game Dynamite Düx and its lead. Why Sonic is not here can be explained in just having Janet from Virtual Cop here, as she has the most comically inappropriate and powerful move that, beyond Bean with cartoon bombs, she can just pull her police standard firearm and shot her opponents. Considering how much Sega protects Sonic as a mascot, which alone would make having him here a no-no.

The game's most infamous character, which is not the last unlockable character, but is the last secret character of the campaign and arguably the final boss, is an actual racing car, as if revenge for the bonus level for Street Fighter 2, where you have to destroy an automobile. Someone had a sense of humour and decided to reference Daytona USA, Sega's legendary 1994 game which got a divisive Sega Saturn port which I have a nostalgic love for and can still appreciate even in mind that it was a compromised release. The iconic Hornet car from that game here will get up on its hind wheels, and scrape tire treads into peoples' faces. The round, where you face them and unlock them in the victory, was spectacular for me even if it is just a silly moment, because of the decades knowing of this secret. Even in mind that the character is properly not practical to use, this was a moment I had waited decades to get to, and also because of the details that are rarely mentioned in retrospective videos on YouTube but make it a funny improvised final boss. Set in a ring within the Three Seven Speedway, the iconic racecourse of the original Daytona game, you also have the original arcade version of Takenobu Mitsuyoshi's The King of Speed, the original song for this track which, for the Saturn conversion, had a reinterpretation with actual instrumentation.All this added to the humour, alongside the fact that, when its armour is broken or does it itself, the car's fighting style changes entirely when a bare chassis. As a conclusion, I can now sat I have pulled a Frankensteiner wrestling move, as a female rollerbladed model, on a racing car, and it makes sense in context but is insane to hear out of it on this sentence.

Fondly remembered, Fighters Megamix got, in 1998, an adaptation for the Game.com released by Tiger Electronics, a curious little disaster of a handheld in history for another day, but sadly has been stuck on the Saturn to the modern day. It is held as one of the gems, one which did get a Western release, and was not a rare title costing an eye watering amount to acquire. However sadly due to the software of the Saturn not being preserved greatly, or that even preserving games on the machine is challenging due to the system's idiosyncratic hardware, this is a title which is absent from re-release. Honestly, third dimensional fighting games have probably invested and refined the genre beyond this virtues of this, in fighting mechanics and appearance, and Super Smash Brothers for Nintendo into the modern day took the idea of idiosyncratic and obscurer references, even as playable brawlers, and ran with it. Fighters Megamix in context to when it was made however, and how fun it is still to play, does deserve a wider interest.

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1) Suzuki: 'Yes on VF3', archived from the Next-Generation.com from December 20th 1996

2) The article on Virtua Fighter [Arcade / Saturn – Beta] for Unseen 64, written by "Monokoma" on October 17th 2008.

3) "Sega Saturn News: Sonic Revival", from Sega Saturn Magazine (UK) (4): 6. February 1996. Archived (PDF) from the original on February 24, 2018.

A Stoker (2010)

 

a.k.a. The Stoker

Director: Aleksey Balabanov

Screenplay: Aleksey Balabanov

Cast: Mikhail Skryabin as Kochegar; Yuriy Matveev as Vassily 'Bizon'; Aleksandr Mosin as the Sergeant; Aida Tumutova as Sasha; Anna Korotayeva as Masha; Varvara Belokurova as Vera

Canon Fodder

 

[Some Major Spoilers]

There is in the centre of this film a stoker (Mikhail Skryabin) who sets up the fires for Russian mafia to dispose of unwanted bodies into at a furnace. Writing a novel on a typewriter in-between working at the furnaces, the stoker continues his days working between his real job, with the burning of coal, and intermittent visits from the mafia. Out of the later Aleksey Balabanov films, A/The Stoker became for me one of the strongest as, even if a pessimistic film at heart, the humanity it still there intermingled with the nihilism of Balabanov.

A Stoker's entire plot is a petty dispute, a romantic triangle between his daughter Sasha (Aida Tumutova) and the daughter of a mobster, Masha (Anna Korotayeva), over one of the latter's goons, leading a disposal within the furnaces that the stoker himself will react to. Though complicit in helping to dispose bodies, he is still arguably an innocent living in his own world until that moment and the path he goes onto in response. Notably, without being directly part of the narrative, the stoker and his daughter Sasha are of Yakut descent, continuing Balabanov's fascinating and admirable trait from The River (2002) of working with Yakut actors as the leads, not presented as different from anyone else but with their own stories and only keeping this in mind to that back story, in this case following an older man who was a former soldier. He has not been paid over two months at his work when we first encounter him, and the mafia using the furnaces at his workplace for other illegal purposes is more of a way to support himself, living there with a bed nearby, in mind to this. This does not even have the exaggeration of Dead Man's Bluff (2005) here when dealing with its crime plot threads, as the banality and ultimately pointless nature of hiring hit men to kill people, and the required disposal of bodies in the stoker's furnaces, is a system we witness throughout this shorter film's novella-like narrative.

A Stoker, steeped in pessimism, is humane nonetheless in reducing all these gangster tropes into pettiness. The banality is found in one hit man having to get his sum for the work from a dingy safe, watched by a man watching porn, in the room near a downstairs bar. The mafia boss who uses our lead knows him and served under him as a sniper when the stoker was part of the military during the Afghan-Soviet War of the eighties, friendly with him only to transgress this when his daughter, out of selfishness, makes an ill-fated decision with a real tragedy. The mafia boss himself is a man comfortable in his own life with an adult daughter, living in his middle age in a well off middle class home, only with this side of working in the criminal underground nowadays, his involvement entirely from an adult daughter whose lack of moral consequences will be traumatising for her and doomed for him.  Marsha, before she betrays Sasha, have a business in a fur store with her, financed by her own father, and even the man they are unwittingly sharing is one of her father's own contract killers, Vassily 'Bizon' (Yuriy Matveev), a mostly mute and silent figure who feels less like a figure cheating behind each of their backs but casually drifting between their arms.

Nothing is over-the-top or passionate. Only the stoker's finale decision has a weight beyond the banal world, one willing to self sacrifice as he dons his old military uniform again. Beyond this, set in the brown and grey industrial and urban world of Russia, the only things of passion here are the rock songs on the soundtrack, a trademark of Aleksey Balabanov that have a profound influence, and how compared to the other films how explicitly sexual the film is. With the two female leads Aida Tumutova and Anna Korotayeva comfortable in doing full nudity, the presence of such casual eroticism, amidst the bland wallpapered rooms and snow covered exteriors, feels less lurid softcore but the eroticism of paintings in how they are depicted. Rather than destructive, they are scenes and interactions with Vassily, the male and female bodies eroticised, with emotions beyond the world even if corporal physical interactions. Sadly, even this is undercut by the fact, once one realises Vassily is being shared between them, the passions they unwittingly share with the same man separately will crush and traumatise many when a body count is created.

As jealously, a petty one with an additional layer for greed, causes pointless death, eventually the stoker himself will act differently, a revenge that is as casually done as it is also unexpected, including by precise use of a ski pole's tip from someone who uses it like a soldier able to use anything would. A Stoker is a bleak farce within its heart, one where you can however still see Aleksey Balabanov possess some semblance of hope even if he dashes it in his characters' fates here. It is hopeful in that there is moments of lightness amidst all this. One legitimate innocent is here, Vera the child (Varvara Belokurova) who visits the stoker continually, even to the point her father visits to see if he is on the level, and admires him from their one interaction. She is the one who will preserve the stoker's unfinished novel, a folktale of an outsider being welcomes into a Yakut home, in an unknown past, only to commit transgressions including raping the wife which will not be left unpunished.

Alongside the ending having this child tell the story, which is clearly done as a jarring choice, Balabanov reflecting his past work, including his use of early cinema, tells this story-within-a-story as a monochrome narrative too. This tale-within-a-tale's moral complexity in itself, the discomforting morality of the director's own films, does not with other films of his come perilously close to being tasteless, even if it involves the wife being punished too by the husband and wishing for it like a pleasure in itself, but becomes elusive and adds a strange discomfort to the entire work we have witnessed. A lot can be gained from Aleksey Balabanov's films in general, even if you do find yourself in uncomfortable territory, and in this case, A Stoker in both its simplicity and when it does not go forth in a clearly meant way are all compelling. In terms of character studies, it is one of the most empathetic even in terms of characters whose deeds are not defendable, all within a tale where everyone, painfully, makes decisions which they let themselves fall into. As a result, as already mentioned, this was one of the strongest of the director-writer's career for me in general because of this attitude.

Cargo 200 (2007)

 

Director: Aleksey Balabanov

Screenplay: Aleksey Balabanov

Cast: Agniya Kuznetsova as Angelika; Aleksey Poluyan as Captain Zhurov; Leonid Gromov as Artem, Professor of Scientific Atheism; Aleksey Serebryakov as Aleksey; Leonid Bichevin as Valera; Natalya Akimova as Antonina; Yuriy Stepanov as Colonel Mikhail; Mikhail Skryabin as Sunka

Canon Fodder

 

[Some Major Spoilers]

Set in 1984, near the end of the Soviet Union, during the Afghanistan War with Russia, in a world of rebellious teens and their Soviet fathers, Cargo 200 is deceptive in its prologue that, once this adaptation of William Faulkner's novel Sanctuary properly starts, the infamous film even in Aleksey Balabanov's career does feel like a grotesque experience even for him. It is a film that comes after Dead Man's Bluff (2005), a nasty parody of Brother (1997), but something more startling in contrast, from an era post-The River (2002) and films which brought the director-writer's side that is more melancholic took over. More so as the film is not presented as an adaptation of the Southern writer Faulkner's novel, but is told as a true story, this feels more provocative than offensive for the sake of it.

The title marks what the film's tone is, "Cargo 200" as a title referring to a code used in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Union countries referring to the transportation of military casualties. This is a world where a professor of scientific atheism, Artem (Leonid Gromov), finds himself in the middle of the countryside, after his car broke down, in the home of a working class patriarch who wants to know where the consciousness came from over mushroom soup, cucumbers and vodka, like this is a bleak comedy from Aleksey Balabanov about the stagnation of the country in the era. Even in 1984 here, the God believer challenges the atheist for all the dead, God or otherwise, left strewn in the history of the Soviet Era before it fully winds down by the end of the decade.  

The horror is not even this patriarch, as if a Texas Chainsaw Massacre scenario is about to transpire, but ultimately a figure of the state, a police captain named Zhurov (Aleksey Poluyan), head of a squad in a small town who kidnaps Angelika (Agniya Kuznetsova), the daughter of the secretary of Regional Committee and Artem's niece who, when she and a male friend breakdown at the same home, frames the home owner for killing Sunka, the Vietnamese employee who tries to take a stand, and does to Angelika over the film what made Cargo 200 as notorious as it became. And, before anyone asks, and with a huge trigger warning, the source novel from William Faulkner, legendary as an author for work like As I Lay Dying (1930), a figure of grand significance in Southern US literature, was as controversial. Penned in 1931, emphasising how literature could get away with far more than cinema at the time in the United States, it was an attempt at a more accessible work for Faulkner which was yet also a lurid pot boiler. With Zhurov being played by a prohibition gangster , in mind to sexual violation with a glass bottle that marks the moment Cargo 200 gets into the horror territory, the source material had this but with a cob of corn, the film for its deeply uncomfortable content still working from a source that was startling when published decades earlier and would decades later in this form.

Scored to rock and pop music, like many films from this period, Cargo 200 could have easily been a tasteless film, and good grief, Cargo 200 will get more extreme as it goes, as Zhurov, claiming Angelika as his girlfriend, has her handcuffed to a bed in the home he shares with his mother, fully complicit to his crime. This psychologically damaged side to him is contrasted by the fact that his police force is just as horrifying, cops who torture their suspects, even killing one at one point and covering it up as resisting arrest. This makes the nastiness of Brother to Dead Man's Hand more understandable in context, but here it fells more significant, in that this for as extreme as it is, is also as extreme a condemnation of what the Soviet Union was as you could get, positioning it as this repugnant period of Russian history even for Aleksey Balabanov's cinema.

Huge trigger warnings are required for the film, managing, even if sick, to try for humour, in that actress Agniya Kuznetsova, in one of her first ever roles, has a hard role to play.  She deserves credit to act this film where she spends most of it naked handcuffed to a bed, and that is before this becomes a ghoulish film too. That, where in an extreme macabre moment, when assigned to help ship the Cargo 200 with his officers, in coffins lined with zinc, Zhurov finds her boyfriend, a soldier killed in the Afghan war, and takes him to her as a bedfellow to keep her company, or lets others have sex with her before shooting them and not taking the corpse out the room. It is never objectifying to her, before one should ask with understandable concern, as this is all ugly, the brown and industrial locations adding to the bleakness without the sense of it being miserable and nasty for a cheap pop.

The exaggerated extreme managed to not just be disgusting, but provocation for a director who has played to the grotesque in Of Freaks and Men (1998), and it is contrasted by the grounded reality. A semblance of hope is to be found when Artem by the end comes to church and faith, less a contrivance, especially when you consider just how nihilistic Aleksey Balabanov's cinema is, but having felt he has went through something so horrifying with the events that transpire, particularly as Angelika is a niece, that it alters him and forces him into finding his faith from the darkness of the world, not the opposite way round as one would presume. It feels not shock for shock's sake, but a twisted farce that plays throughout the film. When the person to end this is an older woman out for revenge with a shotgun, it is in a room full of decaying bodies like a Tobe Hooper film, and that it is an act that has little interest in rescuing anyone, like a perverse Jacobean revenge story. For obvious reasons, Cargo 200 has to be proceeded with in caution, even for Aleksey Balabanov's career, in that this feels like the bleakest, nastiest film from the director even when later films like The Stoker (2010) deal with pointless killing and violence. It is a film which is compelling as a sudden stark shock, but with mind that even this ends with an atheist professor finding God from the horror, even Aleksey Balabanov in his lurid story here marks itself out with a greater spectrum of emotion in its stomach. That it is told as being a "true story", itself as brutal a condemnation of Soviet Russia as you can get, adds so much weight to what he had for this film.

Morphine (2008)

 

Director: Aleksey Balabanov

Screenplay: Sergey Bodrov

Based on the short stories by Mikhail A. Bulgakov

Cast: Leonid Bichevin as Doktor Mikhail Polyakov; Ingeborga Dapkunaite as Anna Nikolayevna; Andrey Panin as Feldsher Anatoliy Lukich; Svetlana Pismichenko as Pelageya Ivanovna; Katarina Radivojevic as Ekaterina Karlovna; Yuri Gertsman as Gorenburg; Aleksandr Mosin as Vlas; Irina Rakshina as Aksinya; Sergey Garmash as Vasiliy Osipovich

Canon Fodder

 

Based on the autobiographical short stories of Mikhail A. Bulgakov, A Young Doctor's Notebook which he wrote between 1925-26, the source material which Morphine adapts drew upon the author's experiences as a newly graduated doctor in 1916 to 1918, practicing in the small village hospital of Smolensk Governorate, an experience as replicated by his stand-in Doktor Mikhail Polyakov (Leonid Bichevin) which included an addiction to morphine. Bulgakov is someone I am familiar with through The Master and Margarita (1966-67), a masterpiece in terms of literature, a figure who, in mind to this being set within 1917, when the October Revolution looms over the narrative of Morphine, would have his work censored by the Soviet state, with even The Master and Margarita, a novel he started writing in 1928, only being published in 1966, decades after his passing. Morphine is still a Bulgakov film though too, set during the period of the October Revolution, up to the time the country of Russia would be changed drastically in the 20th century, where Mikhail the doctor has to still work within an isolated community in the countryside.

This is a time when medicine is in a primitive form, where an autopsy is only allowed if you ask for it, and even then, could be considered sacrilege even in 1917. The title is literal - "the first injection", as a chapter intertitle states, comes from an anti-diphtheria serum which Mikhail is allergic to, leading to his nurse Anna Nikolayevna (Ingeborga Dapkunaite) having to inject him with a morphine shot to overcome the pain from this. In the middle of icy nowhere, as the Revolution beckons, in a small medical station, life for Mikhail is with a great lack of confidence as a doctor, one who still needs to consult his medical text books to complete a woman giving birth even if he succeeds entirely in the goal, as he does with a tracheotomy for a young girl.  Even that later task is under the strife of the girl's grandmother trying to refuse the surgery taking place, as if a taboo. This is a time as well, alongside ether needing to be used as anaesthesia, customs exist like lining a pregnant woman's vagina with sugar to tempt a baby out, leaving Mikhail in a position with many obstacles. From the lack of adequate anaesthesia to having to rely on only a nurse and a fellow doctor, which could prove an issue if they fall unconscious mid-surgery, his is a stressful position, and the accident of having his first morphine shot becomes an overbearing desire to just have them to avoid the cold turkey state.

Worse is when an amputation when required, due to destroying a limb in a breaker for flax with one female patient, is likely to lead to death. One of the more ornate films Aleksey Balabanov, in terms of a period drama, you are however thrust into his usual tone in that this is the scene where the prosthetic effects are fully on display, nasty but in mind to realism of what these scenarios would look like. Some of the tales Morphine adapts are of another time period, where one hazard for anyone let alone a doctor in 1910s Russia is being chased by wolves in the middle of nowhere, at night, on your horse drawn sled. Not much changed though in how busy and hectic medicine is as Morphine's tales, and Mikhail's strain attests to this chaos also being timeless, struggling against what resources are available and, whether one would like to admit this or not, also members of the public who are treated, the balancing board between the Hippocratic Oath and the need to help anyone with full kindness having to negotiate around how a patient or their family can act, even in ways potentially destructive to their well being in petty ways.

Only one aspect of Morphine jars as an issue, and it is unfortunately another layer to how the director-writer skirted problematic content in his films. In this case how a Jewish doctor is the issue, one Mikhail butts head with for morphine, dwindling in availability as supplies are fewer and far between in the midst of war, and a figure who eventually becomes a villain who takes advantage of the new regime to have some power. There is some explicit anti-Semitism from Mikhail at one point, when he goes to the town of Uglich for kicking the morphine addiction in a psychological ward, even if contextually that scene is to provoke anti-Semitic soldiers, with a slur, to attack to the psychological hospital and distract whilst he escapes with some of their morphine stock. It is the one aspect which undercuts Morphine, which is a bleak work which yet stands out from Balabanov on a tight rope between its sombreness and bleak humour, another of those complexities with the Russian director in what is intentionally a provocation, whether justifiable to have, and what is just undefendable.

Aside from this, and it is a tiny part of the entirely production, Morphine could be seen as one of Balabanov's more "conventional" films if it did not have streaks of his more melancholic and nihilistic touches, alongside arguably more humanity than the content may suggest. Humanity is there in that, barring one moment talked of in the paragraph before, and that he does kill someone in defence, Mikhail is the closest to a good person in the director's world, one who is not irredeemable but just wears the costume of a gangster or someone "cool", instead an innocent who desires to help people as a doctor and, sadly, has his worse aspects revealed under the spell of the morphine addiction. Alongside their burgeoning romance, Anna is also a sympathetic figure, even willingly becoming an addict to know why he is, her guilt in having given Mikhail the first morphine injection influence this choice. Morphine as well, befitting Balabanov, has a lot of twisted humour within itself even it is paints a gristly image of the Revolution and the rise of Communism.

There is a joke about Mikhail getting caught trying to take a shot in a gentleman's bathroom, or grotesqueness when, mid-oral sex, as Mikhail is having another relationship with a mistress of a man of power, morphine related nausea and vomiting undercuts any chance for pleasure he can feel.  It neither feels exploitative either, but continuing Balabanov's style from before if, arguably, with a greater sense of sombreness. The sense of this is found that, finding himself succumbing more and more to the titular drug, as Russia is turned upside, Mikhail unlike other protagonists in the director's films has no chance of crawling into power, an outsider simply because he is, truthfully, one of the few with an innocence, if tragically one who is being chewed alive by the drug addiction. [Major Plot Spoiler] Mikhail A. Bulgakov lived as an author, even as a suppressed one, until 1940, becoming as revered around the world as he is in his homeland of Russia. Mikhail in Morphine, within a film theatre laughing at a comedy, continuing Balabanov's fascination with early cinema, pulls a gun on himself and ends his life in the midst of this brief semblance of happiness. Breaking from history, he becomes an Aleksey Balabanov character in the world weary bleakness this ending represents. [Spoiler Ends]

Morphine is a fascinating film, touched by Balabanov's earlier films like The Castle (1994) and Of Freaks and Men (1998), especially in the sense of humour. But it also feels older in terms of the air being more sombre, touched by the populist success of the crime films of his in moving away from overt artificiality for a more realistic period setting. It is a rewarding film from Balabanov's films like many others, and as the one that is closest to an accessible film, only to undercut it with his tone, Morphine does stake out its place with worth.

Two Short Works from Aleksey Balabanov: Trofilm (1995) and The River (2002)

 

Trofilm (1995)

Director: Aleksey Balabanov

Screenplay: Alexey Balabanov

Cast: Sergey Makovetskiy, Zoya Buryak, Semyon Strugachyov, Aleksey Balabanov, Aleksey German

Canon Fodder

 

Trofilm was made for Pribytie poezda (1995), a Russian anthology film which had entries from Vladimir Khotinenko, Aleksandr Khvan, Dmitriy Meskhiev, and Balabanov himself. The anthology is one I have never heard of, and it is an obscure production despite the fact all four directors, not just Balabanov, were prolific in their filmmaker, and Meskhiev is as prolific as a film producer in Russia. At this point, Balabanov had not made Brother (1997), the film which made his name, Trofilm instead connecting closer to the film made before, his Kafka adaptation The Castle (1994), and also nods to Of Freaks and Men (1998), his transgressive bleak comedy set at the turn of the century and about the beginning of cinema. The year 1995 would have also been the 100th anniversary of when cinema was technically "created", when the first moving pictures presented to a paying audience were the Lumière brothers in December 1895 in Paris, France. In 1995 there was a lot of celebratory works commissioned, Lumière and Company, a insanely huge anthology, in terms of the famous directors involved and using an original Lumière Cinématographe camera, which most only know of now for David Lynch's Premonition Following an Evil Deed short. There were documentaries commissioned too, with two by Nagisa Ôshima (100 Years of Japanese Cinema) to Jean-Luc Godard (2 x 50 Years of French Cinema). Trofilm is a sibling, as Pribytie poezda, also known as The Arrival of a Train, was a hundred year celebration for cinema in itself. Co-produced by Roskomkino, a state body representing Russian industry of audiovisual content, Balabanov could be argued to have thumbed them and the other producers in the eye with how this short ends, a film reflecting on the hundred years of cinema if more pessimistic or critical of how cinema was preserved in Balabanov's time then.

Shot in sepia, a man played by Sergey Makovetskiy, a regular cast member for Balabanov, murders his brother because he was romantically connected with his wife. One botched attempt at a hanging later, where the noose just breaks whilst trying to do so in the barn house, and our protagonist wanders forth out onto a train. The short is set between the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, when Russia fought Japan, and alongside being a faithful depiction of this world, Trofilm has a deadpan bleakness to it. Our protagonist will openly admit he hacked his brother to death to almost anyone he passes, be it the train conductor, even a female sex worker later on when she temps him into her bedroom in the pub she is within.

The film is slight in what happens, as inevitably despite this casualness of him admitting his crime of passion, he will be turned in to the authorities. Where the film touches on Of Freaks and Men is that, unlike that film showing how pornography soon into the creation of the medium came about, this plays as both a bleak humoured take on the early actuality films, but almost becomes a nod to how cinema preserves time. Our lead interferes with early cinema history when a French filmmaker is trying to shot a train coming into the station, evoking both L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896), the legendary Lumière film, and their own remakes and the likely replications of this film from the era.

It is, for a film which is ultimately pessimistic, funny to see the logic conclusion that likely happened to the earlier cinema pioneers, of a bystander look aimlessly into the camera, even block the shot, out of curiosity.

Trofilm ends in the then-modern day, nodding to how film shot in the past even preserves the figure on a roll of 1904 Pathé cinematograph footage, showing a train arriving at St Petersburg. A random person, who committed a crime which will be forgotten, unless recorded in the law books, manages to survive in this moment he bumbled into a shot and ruined it. That would be if the most pessimistic joke was not the punch line, completely undermining the point of film archivalism, the people working on the filmmaker's creation calling our lead an idiot, and then proceeding to cut his shots out of the film they would rather have. Trofilm, which looks distinct with its sepia brown look and recreating this time period, fits Balabanov's worldview even in that joke. It neither feels cruel for the sake of it, but a cruel irony on point.

====

The River (2002)

Director: Aleksey Balabanov

Screenplay: Aleksey Balabanov, Evert Paiazatian and Vatsslav Serashevskii

Cast: Tuyaara Svinoboyeva as Mergen; Vasilii Borisov as Kirgilei; Spartak Fedotov as Salban; Anna Flegontova as Anchik; Mariya Kanaeva as Kutuyahsyt; Mariya Kychkina as Bitterhai; Mikhail Semakov as Knyaz; Mikhail Skryabin as Janga

Canon Fodder

 

The River in contrast sadly has a tragic back-story to its creation, real history altering and affecting what was meant to be a feature length production, but became both a micro-feature and an unfinished production. The tragedy is that, for a narrative set in the end of the 19th century within a leper colony in the desolate Arctic region of Yakutia, Tuyara Svinoboeva, the leading actress of his film The River, was killed in a car crash during the shoot. The film was released in 2002 with what footage exists, exposition to clarify the context of scenes not filmed, and made into a chamber piece for what was shot.

The River is fascinating in that, alongside The Stoker (2010), Aleksey Balabanov has devoted himself to two films about the Yakut, a Turkic ethnic group who mainly live in the Republic of Sakha in the Russian Federation.

Considering Balabanov has skirted dangerously thin ice with characters who are racists in his films and nationalism, it fascinates that, whilst very bleak films, his work with Yakut actors and stories around them in these two films are absolutely admiring and respectful for them. Again, these are bleak films, The Stoker melancholic and violent, and The River ultimately his most straightforward drama, of jealously and human petty attitudes causing tragedy within one family. The sense of respect is entirely in how, in the initial narrative, we follow the central family, within a leper group, living their lives in a yurt tent, a large family of people who have to make do with what they have in isolated snow covered environments. Even for those whose leprosy has altered their faces and bodies completely, they live and exist, with the period dress and normal activities depicted. The film, as well as having exposition narrative for plot missing, is acted in the Yakut language too, with a Russian narrator who translates into that language at the same time, showing an admirable attitude in Balabanov in trying to depict these characters.

The tragedy is that, in what he could film, how a younger female character lashes out in this yurt environment. Most of the film does not feel like it is missing significant parts, which helps it a lot, only missing a section where attempts to steal food from others has led to injury and antagonism a huge plot point to consider. The central female lead, the one healthy woman in this leper colony, reacts more and more antagonistic to the other members of this yurt, more so as with the man she has fallen in love with, another woman, his wife, has returned into his life, spiralling into a violent jealously.

The breaking point is ultimately when they acquire a cow, a thing of happiness, especially for the youngest daughter there, but becomes the straw which breaks the camel's back. Hating members of this yurt, the lead will willingly wish to maim the cow, likely others too, by setting a fire, an act ending the film with a tragedy even she regrets and what makes The River incredibly nihilistic. It is so least in terms that for Balabanov, as throughout many of his films, people will even kill others out of petty reasons, which comes back for The Stoker considerably.

The River, in mind to how it sadly was not finished as intended, is an admirable piece, where he showed the diversity of Balabanov's career. Alongside Trofilm, his cinema was wider than that which was released outside of Russia, and sadly, The River is the kind of production which would be ignored, something which would be a crime as by itself. Even in its historical context, it has a lot to admire.

Games of the Abstract: Muramasa - The Demon Blade (2009)

 

Developer: Vanillaware

Publisher: Marvelous Entertainment (For Nintendo Wii version)

One Player

Nintendo Wii

 

An ancient pond. A frog jumps in. The splash of water. Hmm...Not a bad haiku.

Beginning in 1997, with Princess Crown, a production for the Sega Saturn which was not a success financially but gained a cult following, video game developer George Kamitani would found Puragura in 2002, which would rename itself as Vanillaware in 2004. They are a development studio with a very distinct style, Kamitani, who started with the likes of Capcom projects from the eighties, a figurehead whose company he has had influence on still decades later, its emphasis on 2D.5 illustrated art their biggest trademark. By Muramasa: The Demon Blade, the project was to return to the beat-em-up premise that Princess Crown had, meant as both a Japanese ninja equivalent to that game's high Western fantasy aesthetic, but being nicknamed "Princess Crown 3" to emphasise the lineage between the former game and Odin Sphere (2007), a Playstation 2 game where the start of planning out Muramasa began¹. Made for the Nintendo Wii originally, this is a rare tangent for Vanillaware who have mainly worked with Sony, from the Playstation 2 to the PSP handheld and so forth into the present day.

Murmasa is explicitly set in the Genroku period of Japan, between the ninth month of 1688 to the third month of 1704, set around the real life reign of the shōgun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi. Sengo Muramasa, who gives the game its name, was a real sword smith whose craft, made between his life between the Muromachi period (14th to 16th centuries), lead to swords considered the best made as art. However over the centuries these swords also developed reputations, myths and supernatural lore, that they were cursed objects with living bloodlusts, something which explicit in Muramasa the game and its theme of cursed demonic blades with unnatural abilities. Two stories co-exist here, which will interconnect, all connected around demon blades, unnatural weapons (with some explicitly sculpted from tools and weapons welded by omi demons in Hell originally) that hunger for split blood and can repair themselves. With the power to cut through Gods in their potential, we follow Momohime, a young princess, and Kisuke, an amnesiac ninja. Personally, Kisuke's story is the least interesting as he is a generic figure at first. As a ninja mortally maimed, only for a master swordsman to sacrifice his immortal sword so his fighting style is inhereted by Kisuke, he is very generic as the renegade ninja with no memory fighting his own clan, only standing out when his arch introduces Torahime. Revealed as the slain sister of Momohime, she was temporarily resurrected with the thirst for revenge against those who killed her family, with an army of ghost samurai behind her, Kisuke falling for her romantically, despite her time on Earth being limited, which improves his narrative arch considerably by having an emotional arch as a result.

Far more interesting in general is Momohime's, which also requires talking about Jinkuro Izuna, a ronin and master swordsman's student who, having died, still lingered as a soul and wished to find a demon blade that could help him find a new body. Assisted by Kongiku, a shape-shifting female fox (a kitsune) who loves him, Jinkuro by accident but taking advantage of the situation possessed Momohime, with the caveat in this world that only one soul can occupy the body at once. Whilst the other has to float outside as a coloured cloud face, Momohime's narrative is through the ronin having to work around this, fight scenes played with Jinkuro in control, and moments where the souls clash, or even the horror for Momohime of feeling a hangover. Her story, whilst connecting to Kisuke's eventually, is more interesting inherently because of this, alongside the fact that, as a 2D sprawling hack n slash game, where you travel across the main island of the country of Japan, from provinces like Omi to Iso, Jinkuro's quest for a certain sword has a large scale to it. To find the sword that will help in him come back to life will literally lead him and Momohime to Hell itself, and knocking at the door of Heaven and meeting the Amitābha Buddha.

With exceptions, where areas require you to traverse platforms to reach certain routes, the jumping button for travelling spaces is mostly to track down power-ups or for the combat sequences, whilst you will be traversing with the help of a map (unless you wish to turn it off) to each stage and new challenge. The two leads have their own specific special areas on the map which have a long series of fights before bosses. The map is large, and there is a lot to do as you run, jump and float among the stages, with random encounter fights in your way. The combat is simple on the surface, with jumping and dodge mechanics, alongside the demon blades themselves. Even if you do not select Shura mode, which ups the ante for hardness, or even the third unlockable hardest difficulty, the normal Muso mode will still test you. The demon blades themselves, able to have up to three of your choice ready for fights, and found on regular and long blade forms, can counter and block projectile and melee attacks, but if you are not careful, the sword will break and, alongside being like poking an enemy with a toothpick, the damage you can take can dangerously cut through your health if you do not get out the way. With three swords at a time available after the prologues and initial levels, you can unsheathe swords, with its own damage power, but there is both the fact every sword has its own special attack with a reducing power bar, and that thankfully demon swords can be mended, either with special polishing stones you can buy or find, or after some mending time, even if that leaves a risk that if all three swords are busted, you are a sitting duck if you do not move. Shura mode does not allow auto blocking, and the hardest mode, whilst with auto blocking is a one hit death for you.

There are a hundred swords, and to be able to get the true endings for both Momohime and Kisuke, you will require the Oboro Muramasa, all within a game where the main campaigns are short burst of excitement, but there are many extras required to get the six endings altogether that exist. You will have many challenges. You will come to hate ninja, especially when they have a tendency to occupy platform areas throwing bombs and using smoke bombs to move locations, or the annoying flying kite riders who explode when defeated. You will face kappa and strange umbrella yōkai, to giant poisonous frogs, and once you encounter Omi demons, even next to the boss fights, you will find yourself in a challenge that was revenge at me gleefully knocking about their smaller omi siblings with ease. The game has many aspects, some on the RPG genre, too which once you invest in both help considerably but add a personality to the production itself.

The cooking feature is one such example. Food is another trademark of Vanillaware, since Odin Sphere, becoming one of the oddest yet inspired touches of Muramasa here whilst not a game for vegetarians and vegans in some of the meal choices, going as far having wild boar and pheasant which will attack you but bags your next meal when stopped. Not only do you get a video game embracing culture, with a variety of Japanese dishes available from nearby dining stores to purchasing cookbook recipes, but there is the advantage that these meals do not just heal you. They can increase the amount of soul power you can have that, alongside being acquired in the slaughtered bodies you pile up, are needed to forge demon swords. Alongside having some like rice balls and cooked fish which you can store as health power-ups for use mid-fight, some of the dishes you eat immediately in the cooking menu have special abilities to certain dishes which are temporary, such an all-vegetable and tofu dish so good it is able to resurrect you from the dead once.

Muramasa has so much personality in general, unable to be denied how gorgeous the game is in terms of presentation, recreating this period of Japan in aesthetic whilst adding its own personality. Fully invested in both Japanese mythology and Buddhist lore it spins itself into some great rewards, from the idiosyncratic enemies to the two kitsune in human form, not only Kongiku and her love for Jinku, which becomes a sad tale in most of the endings, but also Yuzuruha, another who is aiding Kisuke in his quest. Only sixteen people, over half the entire staff of Vanillaware, including Kamitani as the game's writer, were working on this production², which is surprising considering how lavish the game feels, and makes the production's virtues even more standout. With an art style similar to Japanese woodblock art, the production went as far as to also have precise accents for the cast suitable for the period, with the game's Western Wii release entirely in the original Japanese with subtitles, Muramasa feels distinct for a game for the Wii. The music by the company Basiscape and sound producer Hitoshi Sakimoto - in collaboration with sound director Masaaki Kaneko, and the music composed with Sakimoto himself, Yoshimi Kudo, Noriyuki Kamikura, Mitsuhiro Kaneda, Kimihiro Abe, Azusa Chiba and prolific video game composer Masaharu Iwata - is exceptional, more so as, realising this project was desiring a more faithful interpretation of this setting, Sakimoto changed the tone from what he originally intended to have³. Instead, this group created a soundtrack with Japanese instruments which were exquisite.

The world's vibrancy is matched by how much personality it has, both grim and pleasant. You will find young boys selling health power-up rice balls, wannabe poets, or wander through the red light district and coming across men who are waiting to spend time with sex workers, getting some cutting remarks from Jinkuro in Momohime's body when any try to flirt with her. You will also encounter ghosts of dead women weeping in lament of their loses, or find yourself in both stories dealing with government corruption, contrasting this colour with a more serious tone, all told in the various endings you can get as folktales by a narrator which, by the end of the game when you complete it all, teases as if this will be of many stories in this world.  

The game also has an exaggerated art style which helps the tone. Characters are drawn with unconventional and cartoonish proportions that, with its almost painterly style, help Muramasa stand out as an incredible looking production. It has its idiosyncrasies, which connect to its director George Kamitani, such as characters like Momohime looking almost doll-like with her giant head, to some of the grotesque enemies you will encounter like giant one-eyed and blue skinned demon monks. One trait that will raise eyebrows, and is something which needs to be brought up with Kamitani's style, is that he does exaggerate his characters including female ones, such as the Yuki-onna enemies (snow maidens of Japanese folklore), in their curves. The extreme case here is Kongiku, who is comically busty.

This is an exaggeration that is clearly deliberately, where even the fact you have hot springs in this game, which recover all status bars, are not portrayed in a very lewd way in the slightest with the female casts. This did later on for Vanillaware come to bite them in the backside, more so with how Kamitani clearly misread the room in how to response, when their PS3 beat-em-up Dragon's Crown (2013), based on Western high fantasy tropes, got into trouble for the character designs for two of the playable leads, an Amazon and a Sorceress, figures who are exaggerated to an extreme, for the later "backbreaking" an apt term. It is specifically the review by Jason Schreier of Kotaku, who strongly criticized the designs in 2013 which even had Kamitani directly involved in communication and a satire back which backfired in interpretation, involving three buff dwarves bathing which Schreier initially viewed as a homophobic barb⁴. Gender politics and how female characters are depicted in video games is still a huge problem a decade after - as even Hideo Kojima with characters like Quiet in the Metal Gear Solid franchise got called out for this - but I will always be wary of taking a position because this is a subject for female video gamers to debate on. Kamitani's style as an artist is deliberately over-the-top. He does have a lot of eroticism which, in terms of a male gaze, is something which is going to put some people off, but there is also the question of how individual female video gamers take to these designs, those who do find these types of characters in their dress a negative, those who look to them positively, those who may even cosplay or draw fan art of these figures which, if any exist, does really undercut taking a codified stance on the subject as being inherently one side of the argument or the other.

Kamitani's style is also hyper-cartoonish, which is also one of the game's biggest positives to bring the subject back to the qualities of the game. He will depict male characters throughout his career as being comically over-muscled, seen here with the option to ride a palanquin to travel he map, until you finish the first ending and can warp from the save temple, which is carried by two men who are nude barring loincloths and have full elaborate musculature where the term "beefcake" is appropriate. There is an example here, whilst sexualised in some aspects, which does emphasis how his art style is deliberately unnatural, in that one of the boss fights is against a Shinto god, Raijin the thunder God. The game gender swaps the male god, who in most ancient art and fanart is usually shirtless and wearing little, be he almost demonic or buff hunk, and Raijin here is a hyper-muscled and big figured Goddess, one whose art style does not necessarily defend Kamitani's art style, but is one which distorts and exaggerates the human body. Even the more non-human enemies and bosses are the same, between giant bulbous ninja as a boss, omi demons which are horrifying tanks that take a while to put down, or giant centipede bosses which go beyond the screen. The bystanders, male and female, young and old, have cartoonish looks which vary between quaint or for comic effect. The Dragon's Crown controversy is worth bringing up as a tangent directly connected to this game as this is definitely a case of a game whose idiosyncrasies are an acquired taste, more so as unfortunately depictions of female characters is a problem in general for videogames still, especially in ones where there is no clear attempt as here in having an aesthetic which distorts and flourishes on characters intentionally as here.

Muramasa does have one aspect which is at least frustrating until you get the reward - that to get the proper endings, you have to complete the post-game extras and get the Oboro Muramasa. Swords won in boss battles open up the forge option to acquire new weapons, but on the first run too, there are those designed to cut down specific coloured barriers and entrances to "lairs", the later challenges with boss and enemy rushes of a variety of levels recommended to try them. The post game for both leads will require you to reach almost Level 99, as high as you can get, to weld the Oboro Muramasa, and with characters able to play the other's campaign special levels and white lairs, the most significantly challenging levels, does mean a lot of replay, and a lot of repeated content, is involved. The repetition is the real issue to be honest, but thankfully, there was a sense of accomplishment even if the endings vary for personal taste. [Major Plot Spoilers] The additional endings depend on the player for whether they are worth them - the first for both characters are pretty bleak, and the final ones for Momohime and Kisuke change the characters fates entirely, with the sword required even apparently able to cut through time itself let alone down gods. Admittedly, Momohime's final one is a bit disappointing as she becomes sidelined as a wife, if contrasted by the fact it is more of an ending for Jinkuro, learning from his mistakes and not putting Momohime through the story itself. Far more interesting as one of the two second endings for both characters, which involve specific swords and fighting each other as the final bosses to reach, is Momohime's where, with Jinkuro sacrificing his soul to meld with hers, she becomes an amnesiac with inhuman sword welding abilities, protecting an elderly couple who looked after her from an Omi demon. [Major Spoilers End] Even in mind to my preferences for which ending was better, the entire experience of beating the game for 100%, even on the easiest mode, was worthwhile.

Muramasa is one of the most expensive games for the Nintendo Wii in the time that has past, but not without thankfully gaining praise as a gem for the console. Sadly, at the time, it was an underselling game, but in an interesting turn of events, when Vanillaware fully committed to working with Sony, they re-released a new version of this game for their Playstation Vita handheld called Muramasa Rebirth. Alongside small gameplay touches, and a complete retranslation for the Western release, the game also had downloadable content, involving four new characters with their own stories. That is for another review however. Focused on Muramasa: The Demon Blade itself, the original Nintendo Wii release, this is a game that took a long while to complete, but fully submerged into its world, it became something special for me and a truly worthwhile experience I would recommend to everyone to try.

 

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1) Muramasa: The Demon Blade Developer Interview, by Matt Leone and published for 1Up.com on July 10th 2008.

2) ヴァニラウェアは命がけでゲームを作る会社――クリエイター神谷盛治氏・ロングインタビュー by 4Gamer.net., published on May 21st 2013.

3) Muramasa -The Demon Blade- Original Soundtrack liner notes, from vgmonline.net.

4) The Real Problem With That Controversial, Sexy Video Game Sorceress [UPDATE] by Jason Schreier, published by Kotaku on April 23rd 2013 with updates added by Schreier.