With Harakiri wedged between the
first and second Spiders films, Lang goes to a similar toolkit in it. The camera hardly moves, and while the
director uses editing to show simultaneous time, he doesn't create suspense by intercutting here as much as in the other two films. These characters pose in each episodic scene, and we don’t learn enough to sympathize with any of .
And unlike in the Spiders films, where space and time are very logical and clear, this story has gaps, inconsistencies and unclear points. It takes some time to figure out the setting
of the opening part of the film (shrine or official’s home?), and character
motivations are elusive throughout. At
one moment Olaf Anderson loves O-Take-San, and although we don't see the psychology behind the change, he's soon home with his
European wife ignoring his abandoned love's pleas for support.
When Olaf returns to Japan, he takes his European wife with him for reasons that are never clear, and he resists claiming his own biracial son until his European wife
goes to meet O-Take-San. Even O-Take-San
herself elicits little character sympathy. Her situation is sad because of its melodramatic circumstances, but rather than taking on any agency in her own life, she simply responds to those around her, from her father to the High Priest to Olaf to Prince Matahari. Her sole effort at using her own will is to
refuse when she’s offered a way out of her problems.
Neither of the two principals engages.
With so little happening
technically or narratively, Lang still grabs us to some extent here with exotic
visuals. As in The Golden Sea, every scene of Harakiri is
packed with interesting visuals. Here, Oriental art and furniture decorate the frame, and the gardens have a distinctly
Japanese quality to them with overgrown pines framing figures. Some of Lang’s exterior shots trade in East
Asian art composition, too, with small figures in a confined space placed on a
larger landscape. To better show off all this engaging detail, Lang again uses depth of field effectively. One tour de force moment of his using depth is when O-Take-San comes towards us in the foreground as her father ominously says goodby in the midground against a background of elaborate Japanese decoration. Likewise, Lang uses depth of field symbolically when the tender of the shrine walks in the foreground past a large midground urn to then head into the background to sleep in the bushes. All these show off Lang's already thorough grasp of space in the frame. And in a more cinematic sphere, as Olaf and his naval mates head to the red light district, a subject
Lang often turns to, Lang uses
red tint rather than a typical blue for the night,. This little gesture is a hint of
the boldness he’ll soon employ in larger, expressionist works.
The short story “Madame Butterfly”
inherently lends itself to melodrama given the basic narrative, and Lang
combines that with some visual flourish to create a worthwhile film. But this rendition doesn’t engage us with full characters or involve us in the story, so we’re left with a sequence of
episodes that lack a rich unifying unity.
Better films were to come.
