Review of Love and Honor (2006) by Luke B — 16 May 2009

Love and Honor is even greater than Yamada's previous films Twilight Samurai and Hidden Blade. He has perfected his style of serene and subtle tales of ill-begotten samurai. Here we find a lord's poison taster left blinded after eating some out of season shellfish.

What follows is a web of lies, slowly broken down. Each time the truth surfaces, things get a little worse. Like the films pace, the lies start as small, with Kimmura's wife saying that the fireflies have not yet come out, probably to stop him from missing such beautiful sites.

Yamada even manages to make the audience appreciate the littlest insect, as a blind Kimmura is, unknowingly, pestered by a butterfly. It builds to a wonderfully tense climax and an excellent and underplayed duel.

The visual lyricism and subtext of the dialogue is wonderfully scattered in the film. Despite the film's gloomy goings on, it is never a depressing film. In fact, it has an excellent sense of visual humour that works surprisingly well.

Yamada has left it late in life, but his recent samurai trilogy rivals some of Kurosawa's classics.