|
|
In 1901, Iheiji (Ken Ogata) arrives in Hong Kong from Japan as an
immigrant trying to make enough money to marry his girl at home, Shiho
(Mitsuko Baisho). However, he soon crosses paths with a Japanese diplomat,
Captain Uehara (Hiroyuki Konishi), who figures Iheiji is just naive enough
to make the perfect spy in regards to Russian war efforts in Manchuria,
and before you know it, Iheiji and prostitute Tome (Shino Ikenami) make a
perfect team spying on the Russians - until she's found out and brutally
executed, upon which Iheiji flees back to Hong Kong. But his mission to
Manchuria has made Iheiji a perfect patriot, and once back he takes it
upon himself to "free" all Japanese prostitutes in Hong Kong.
But once he has achieved that, he has to learn the Japanese embassy
refuses to send them back to Japan and the girls don't want to go back and
prefer to make money abroad to send to their families. So in an odd turn
of events, Iheiji starts to run a brothel with the girls he freed. At that
time, Shiho comes back into his life, but not the innocent girl he used to
know, but a prostitute who has only recently fled from a brothel in
Singapore - but love trumps anything, and she becomes his wife, even if
she still does favours to other men for a price. Surprisingly, Iheiji
turns out to be a pretty successful brothel owner, also because he sees
his work his patriotic duty for the glory of Japan and insists to run a
"national brothel". Soon enough he branches out and ultimately
moves to Kuala Lumpur to open a big brothel and also a rubber farm. And
life could be so good, if it wasn't for the fact that one of the local
kingpins was Wang (Ko Chun-Hsiung) an ex lover of Shiho's who tries
everything to win her back on one hand, and the war between Russia and
Japan that's really bad for business on the other. But even with
everything around him crumbling, Iheiji never ceases to be a perfect
patriot ... With more than a few shades of Don
Quixote, Zegen is a drama full of irony about a man so
convinced about his own beliefs that he fails to see nobody else shares
them. And despite the film, spanning from turn of the century till World
War II, is very epic in scope, it fails very intimate, thanks of course to
a well-conceived script, but also thanks to a directorial effort that
never makes a fool out of its main character and does never go for a cheap
joke, and also to a very relatable performance by Ken Ogata, leading a
very solid cast. And the result of all of this is a pretty great and also
hugely entertaining movie for sure.
|
|
|