The utter sincerity and humanity reflected in every scene of Kon Ichikawa’s The Burmese Harp is replaced here with a cold yet playful post-modern distance.  A revolutionary revenge film in its own right, it’s very difficult to believe that the Ichikawa responsible for so many memorable yet bleak post-war images in the 1950s is the same man who directed this formally audacious and vibrant cinematization (not a word, until now) of the kabuki theater.  Ichikawa transforms a rote concept, a man looking to avenge his parents death, from a cliché into something otherworldly, and downright transcendent really, through his invigorating use of color, negative space and self-reflexive stylistic flourishes.  The dichotomy of actor and avenger is fleshed out wonderfully in the complex examination of the effects of revenge on identity, particularly sexuality.  For Yukinojo, his entire life has been a performance at the service of his quest for blood, thus Ichikawa presents a world continually stuck between the stage and reality with the screen as mediator between the two.

Yukinojo‘s revenge tale is effective first and foremost because of the delicacy and restrained anger of Kazuo Hasegawa, whose performance is as strange as it is awe-inspiring.  Playing a well-respected female impersonator in a traveler theater troupe, Yukinojo’s feminized nature is an extension of his rejection of his true identity, literally shrouding himself behind lies to the point that he has become one himself and Hasegawa conveys all of this with enigmatic grandeur.  The film’s heightened style reflects the artifice of Yokinojo’s projection of himself, his intentions and everything he stands for; it’s all a set-up, a chess game, and Ichikawa’s distinctively expressive mise-en-scene allows the emotional battles to play out perfectly on a visceral and representational level.  Dragging the kabuki theater kicking and screaming into the post-modern era of the 1960s, An Actor’s Revenge remains a challenging film and where it could easily have been little more than an experiment in form and genre, it retains all of the effectiveness of the bombastic melodrama inherent in the theater it so lovingly steals from.  It’s as if Ichikawa broke down kabuki into its most essential elements and reconstructed it in his own vision, giving it a newfound energy and uniqueness that only the cinema can give us.  It’s not always perfect, but it’s one ballsy film that still feels like nothing else I’ve ever seen.