The Warrior

Young British director Asif Kapadia based his first feature film on an old Japanese folk tale. The film is nevertheless situated in India, in the beautiful landscape of Rajasthan and the snowy peaks of the Himalayas.The plot is actually a simple morality tale sometime in the past, in the age of swords and warriors. The main hero, an amazingly skilled and brave warrior, decides to turn his back on the sword and bloodshed after a mystical encounter. He stops obeying his chief. To punish the warrior for this abrupt decision, the chief asks for his head and kills his son. The warrior gets tempted again to follow the old path of violence to seek revenge. On the way, he meets a young boy whose parents got killed by some warrior, maybe even by him personally. He also meets a blind old woman who feels that his face has been covered with blood. The warrior again faces the old dilemma.The whole film is structured as a haiku poem: simple, abstract and quite minimalist in composition. In spite of hundreds of extras and lots of camels and horses, the film gives the impression of a poetic Zen tale about a man and his sword switching to a tale about a man and his soul.