The Akira Kurosawa movie Ayo Edebiri has watched 50 times: “A truly masterful film”
Anyone who watched the first season of The Bear, the kitchen-chaos comedy-drama that burst seemingly out of nowhere onto screens in 2022, will be aware that there was a definite moment, probably around the end of episode three, where you paused for and thought to yourself, ‘Wait…this is absolutely amazing”.
While admittedly part of that may have been down to hearing ‘Animal’ by Pearl Jam slamming into the end credits, a lot of it came down to the sheer brilliance of writer and actor Ayo Edebiri. She was the focal point at the start of the series, the camera following her character, Sydney Adamu’s challenging and occasionally dangerous journey from a nervous culinary student to a take-no-prisoners chef of some repute.
Her performance in the show was so good that it deservedly earned her an Emmy, a Golden Globe and two Screen Actors Guild awards. And if that weren’t enough, when she stepped behind the camera to direct an episode (season three’s ‘Napkins’), she scooped a Director’s Guild of America nomination for that too. That’s aside from being a writer and producer on vampire comedy smash We Are The Shadows. This is a serious talent we are talking about.
Perhaps it was no surprise then to discover Edebiri’s taste in movies is equally beyond reproach. Challenged by Criterion to select the films she loves most, Edebiri provided a list of cinema classics that, while perhaps not quite as well-known to mainstream audiences as some, are definitely worth hunting down.
She kicked off her selection with High and Low, a movie that is currently being reimagined by Denzel Washington for A24 later this year. Directed by Japanese auteur Akira Kurosawa in 1963, the film is a police thriller in which a wealthy mogul is held to ransom by crooks, initially believing they have his son. When it turns out the kid they have is actually the child of his chauffeur, he faces a moral dilemma: pay the ransom or keep the money he needs to keep his business thriving.
Widely considered one of the finest police procedurals ever made, High and Low was a box office success in Japan and has gone on to influence several directors. Edebiri is a huge fan, for one, explaining, “I’ve been seeing this popping off again on Letterboxd, which I think is good, because this is just a truly masterful film to me, and I think Kurosawa is so amazing. I watched this, it felt like, 50 times. It just all felt like a dance. Like, the camera is dancing, but also, like, the actors are doing their own sort of choreography, and it all just is like one beautiful step to the point where I was like ‘Is he a dancer?’ And he wasn’t. He did [Japanese martial art] Kendo, which I think, you know, there’s movement in that.”
That movement was also part of why Edebiri paid particular attention to the performance of one of the film’s main stars in the form of Tsutomu Yamazaki, the handsome young Japanese actor that Kurosawa would go on to cast in two more of his movies, 1965’s Red Beard and Kagamusha in 1980.
Edebiri continued regarding movement, “He has this moment of physicality at the end of the movie that is like high theatre to me. It’s one of the most beautiful things ever when he’s up against the window and they’re having their final confrontation, and he just makes one motion with his body that I think about a lot.”
The movie’s final scenes that she’s referencing have proved just as influential as many of Kurosawa’s other works. The asylum set design of the 2022 superhero update of The Batman was inspired by the prison scene at the end of High and Low, and Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho has also discussed the film’s impact on his multi-award-winning Parasite, both in terms of themes and direction.
Edebiri went on to select more films that have stood the test of time and then some, picking out the likes of 1981’s Thief, the brilliant Michael Mann debut starring James Caan, the Cary Grant-Audrey Hepburn comedy Charade and Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket, starring Owen Wilson, who co-wrote the script.
Plus, she casually did it all while rocking a Radiohead T-shirt. She’s a legend.
