25/09/2024 - Kiyoshi Kurosawa readapts his 1990s film Serpent’s Path, setting it in contemporary France, for an unhinged thriller that investigates the pointless obtuseness of evil

Presented at the 72nd edition of the San Sebastián Film Festival, Serpent’s Path [+see also:
trailer
film profile] is the new film by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the prolific Japanese auteur directing for the third time in 2024 after Chime, released exclusively on platforms, and Cloud, out of competition at the Venice Film Festival. As in his 1998 film of the same name, Serpent’s Path tells the story of a vendetta, the legitimacy of which remains unknown, perpetrated by Albert (Damien Bonnard) against his daughter’s killers (amongst which is Mathieu Amalric, not new to Kurosawa’s cinema) and accomplished with the help of psychologist Sayoko (Ko Shibasaki).

The sidekick’s change of gender and profession, originally a man teaching maths, remain the big difference between the two films, together with the shifting of the action from Japan to France. By contrast, the grotesque situations that create the malaise that permeates the whole film remain intact, albeit with different nuances. If, however, upon viewing the original, a certain unease remains due to both the stylistic approach of the director (with some images almost shot with documentary urgency) and the mysterious finale, an aspect of mechanical rigidity transpires in the contemporary version, the result of an operation that seems to have been carried out as a pure exercise in style. 

For Kurosawa, the evil that has been removed, in the contemporary moment, continues to be embodied in the cold technology of a 2020s Paris, immobilised between the myth of tradition and the pretensions of still being an avant-garde city, both of which are nostalgic in nature for an era that once was (is there anything more nostalgic than a remake?). 

Terror in Kurosawa’s film stems from the awareness that the investigation on the nature of evil, positioned between the two poles of vendetta and sadism, doesn’t find convincing answers. For Kurosawa, evil doesn’t have a raison d’être, evil is a non-sense, embodied in Albert’s mean stupidity as interpreted by Bonnard, who unsurprisingly and in a perverse manner offers the film’s most comical moments, and the coldness of the character of Sayoko, less fascinating than Nijima explaining mathematics in Japan at the turn of the millennium. 

Another central theme in Serpent’s Path is that of lies and the false nature of images. The characters keep lying to others and to themselves (and it is no coincidence that Sayoko is a psychologist, who cures and annihilates them by freeing them from their own lies) and Kurosawa exposes them to various kinds of images, in turn victims and executioners, deceptive and deceived. This visual torture calls into question the presumed innocence of the spectators, and interrogates the voyeuristic perversity and the toxic pervasiveness of screens in the contemporary world, which has grown exponentially from the distant yet already corrupted year 1998. These screens, like distorting mirrors, project a disturbing and always more distorted image of the world and of ourselves. 

Despite the philosophical profundity to which Kiyoshi Kurosawa has accustomed us, or perhaps because of it, the feeling one gets when watching Serpent’s Path is that it has the vices and the ambition of a failed great work. If it didn’t carry the weight of such an illustrious predecessor, judgement on the film would probably be positive, or at least it could have been suspended. But even a filmmaker can’t be asked to create the same images as he did almost 30 years ago, those who have seen the original will probably be disappointed, wallowing in nostalgia for a cinema that once was.  

Serpent’s Path was produced by Cinéfrance Studios (France), Tarantula (Belgium and Luxembourg) and Kadokawa Corporations (Japan), the latter of which will also handle international sales.

(Translated from Italian by Manuela Lazić)