In this rather gentle film from Yoji Yamada (who helmed much of the Tora-san series), Iguchi (Hiroyuki Sanada), a middle-aged, low-level samurai who works as a clerk, is nicknamed “twilight” by his colleagues, because he forgoes the after-work boozing and goes home early to care for his family. He ekes out a subsistence living — torn between his duty to the clan and the fulfillment he finds through his domestic life — until a crisis demands he pick up his sword. More quiet drama than action flick, there is only one battle in this film — and even then it is between two unwilling men far from their physical prime. Indeed, Yamada’s film, set in the waning 19th-century days of Japan’s clans, invokes the “twilight” designation often ascribed to late-’60 and early ’70s Westerns that were slower, moodier pieces that found former macho heroes contemplating new social orders as well as their own mortality. In Japanese with subtitles. Denis 
This article appears in Jul 8-14, 2004.
