Twilight Samurai (Tasogare Seibei)

"Tasogare Seibei (The Twilight Samurai)," Yoji Yamada's 77th film, is also his first period drama, though the 48 episodes of his Tora-san series were period dramas in all but name. Tora-san, that perpetually lovelorn peddler, may have traveled all over Japan in the last three decades of the 20th century, but he and his extended family from downtown Tokyo were throwbacks to another era -- a friendlier, warmer, slower-paced Japan. In "Tasogare Seibei," which is based on a best-selling novel by Shuhei Fujisawa, Yamada finds in the last days of the Edo Period (1600-1867) a Japan uncannily like the one we're living in today, complete with premodern versions of yen-pinching recessionary lifestyles, corporate restructuring, office politics -- and men who can't say what they feel. Yamada's trademark humanism is also much in evidence, tempered by a darker, more tragic view of human nature than that found in the Tora-san films. This view, however, does not appear until the third act, after more than an hour of warmed-over melodrama about star-crossed lovers, aimed at Yamada's core audience.