Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

A samurai in the city

Jim Jarmusch wrote and directed Ghost Dog in 1999 and took it to Cannes in competition that year. The film moves the samurai code to an unnamed American city (most of it was shot in Jersey City): Forest Whitaker plays a hitman who sees himself as the retainer of Louie, a second-rate mobster, and serves him to the end because he owes him his life.

The thread running through it is the Hagakure, the book of precepts by the samurai Yamamoto Tsunetomo written in the early 18th century. Passages read in voice-over and shown on screen break up the story: death as the horizon of every day, loyalty to one's master, preparing the mind. Ghost Dog talks to his master only through homing pigeons.

What practitioners will notice

This is not a film of choreographed fights. Most confrontations are settled with guns, and Jarmusch shoots the hitman's routine as a ritual. What will interest a martial artist is the code itself: solitary sword practice on the roof, daily discipline, the idea of following a way even when the world around you has dropped it. A young woman lends Ghost Dog a copy of Rashōmon, the Akutagawa stories behind Kurosawa's film, and the character owes a clear debt to the hitman of Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï.

Reception

Whitaker carries the film with very little dialogue, alongside John Tormey, Henry Silva and Isaach de Bankolé as an ice-cream seller who speaks only French. The score is by RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan, his first for a feature. It competed for the Palme d'Or, was nominated for the César for best foreign film and the Independent Spirit Award for best feature, and holds 84% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. It grossed $3.3 million in the US and about $9.4 million worldwide.