Tags : Cinelogue

This film also marks the end of a very long, productive phase for Kurosawa—infancy as a film artist through middle-age—and the beginning of the old man, whose grammar would regress to childhood with 1970’s Dodes’kaden before a failed suicide attempt would spur him towards one of his greatest critical achievements, a masterpiece of colossal bitterness, Ran. Of course, Mifune’s lips are really the master’s, and even by 1965 he hadn’t decided whether humanity was worth salvation or not. Here, the answer is yes. By the time of Ran, affirmatively ‘no’.

This is an inversion of the classic Kurosawa quick-motion pan—this time the cameras are positioned on a moving subject as it darts past the stationary objects of its gaze. After the long static drama of the first half, this four-minute scene is exhilarating with its free cuts and fluid movements. Kurosawa employs nine roving cameras… to capture every gaze and reaction, including Gondo’s pained expression when he finally slides the suitcases out of the narrow washroom window. Expert editing reduces it to the necessary action, giving it the fluidity of real-time and the fixity of crisis.

Sanjûrô is perhaps Kurosawa at his most didactic, though like his other preachy works it isn’t heavy-handed. Indeed it is hardly apparent at all. The ostensible major theme is most succinctly expressed by the lady. The character of the lady (and daughter) seems to offer a counterbalance between Sanjûrô and the young samurai… She speaks in bromides: the evident pleasures of sleeping in hay, the beauty of camellias floating downstream. The greatest of these is the advice proffered to the swordsman: “Good swords stay in their sheaths.” This phrase is completely trite yet, to the ronin, eminently profound.

These popular films of which Yojimbo is the keystone are rich in action and metaphor, and ultimately about filmmaking. Lacking in nobler qualities they tend toward the comic, and filmmaking after all can be an amusing process. The presentation of the world of Yojimbo is crystalline. There’s bad, there’s worse and then there’s our hero. He slices his way through a realm whose stupidity and facetiousness is obvious. This is amusing because the kind of heroes we’re accustomed to worshipping on the screen are noted for their ruth and cleverness and nobility in a sea of mystery and intrigue.

Though never acknowledged explicitly by Kurosawa, The Bad Sleep Well parallels “Hamlet” in many ways obvious and subtle. The plot itself should leap from the screen to anyone with a cursory knowledge of Shakespeare’ play: a man driven to avenge his father’s murder by destroying the perpetrator, who becomes his second father (step-father in Hamlet and father-in-law in this film). Nishi loves Keiko as Hamlet loves Ophelia, but the strength of his conviction to revenge is such that she must be sacrificed. Both stories are tragic, ending with a pile of corpses, but for The Bad Sleep Well this is not initially apparent… unless you manage to grasp all of the disparate metaphor in its opening sequence.

The hidden fortress itself is manipulated through editing to appear as a sort of negative stronghold, with secret channels connecting it to strategic places such as the freshwater pond where the gold is kept by Rokurota. As we travel with our band of knaves, Kurosawa uses twisting avenues and bridges to lengthen his locations; if instead it were open plains, his telephoto lens would effectively collapse all this imaginary space. Really we haven’t gone very far from one province to the next, but Kurosawa makes us believe we have, and we go with him.

The reality of the film itself can be seen as what we (and the characters) experience in the immediate now, but it’s equally the immovable force that gives birth to fantasies about better things, whether they’re in the past or the imagined future. On that theme, The Gambler and The Pilgrim certainly present opposing viewpoints, with The Gambler being the hard-edged cynic that can’t tolerate the fabrications of the other characters… The Pilgrim, instead, chooses to indulge the characters’ fantasies, realizing that, sometimes, they are precisely what people need to survive at all.

Kurosawa renders Washizu as an impotent caricature of Macbeth. Not only does the director take Asaji’s machinations to ridicule and motivate her husband much further than Lady Macbeth’s, but he completely removes Macbeth’s conflicted monologues, his heroism and vehemence, his sense of guilt and his final words of contrition. The sense is that Washizu is compelled to act rather than innately ambitious. He is still a tragic figure, but a wave in a ceaseless tide of human tragedy.

The fact that social barriers between people of different origins, classes, ages and genders are crumbling, that values are being conceived anew suggest the end of an epoch and the beginning of a new one. The transformative power of history, the rise and ebb of politics here is dramatized in a handful of lives enduring a couple of days. History may appear immanent to the modern observer, but these are big ideas and vast currents that did not form in the same tide, nor overnight. Smart storytellers eschew an infinity of causes for the effects.

There certainly is an impressive tonal note sustained throughout the project, even as the edits sometimes pile on so fast as to reduce the narrative to near tatters. It is surely this quality that has lead some to classify the film as one of Kurosawa’s finest. If you can ignore the narrative lapses and unsure progression of the drama then the atmosphere the film evokes may well carry you through…

I think many critics these days are willing to shortchange this film because of its distance from the present and its theoretical simplicity. It’s only simple if you think Kurosawa is trying to say something, namely that all truth is relative. That seems to be the consensus these days. Relativism. Case closed. But what Kurosawa and his screenwriter are really much closer to, without totally confronting us with it, is the subtler notion that truth and actuality are separate ideas.

On her death bed she understands that her father has been bought, that he is intentionally losing the case for Aoe and Maiko. She is physically weak and she knows that she will die, but her fortitude, sincerity and compassion soars. She has the emotional strength of a lion, as opposed to her father who is healthy but commands the will of a slug.

It’s no accident that Murakami chooses a soldier’s uniform… In so doing, he not only follows in his thief’s footsteps, but in the invisible corridor of reality forever precluded by the choices he made. His chosen profession means fighting against the very person he might have become which leads to an incongruent degree of passion for a case that might otherwise seem a trifle.

The operation takes place in a small shack, and the intensity of it is palpable. The storm without, the leaking roof within, the pestering flies and the unbearable humidity add up to an uncomfortable situation. These irritants break the doctor’s focus leading him to cut himself and contract the disease. We have a brilliant interplay of light and shadow cutting across the lilly white uniforms of the nurses along with the various aforementioned aural stimuli. This scene is pure Kurosawa, practically a telescoping of his methods.

Born of the considerations of postwar Japan, Drunken Angel marks the first major breakthrough and the opening of an era for Akira Kurosawa. Many consider it to be his “first film,” in the sense that the distinct elements that color the oeuvre we know so well came together for the first time. It incisively and cohesively epitomizes an era of the human condition and it’s amazing the film turned out the way it did. It was filmed in 1948 during the occupation and, though there is no depiction of soldiers, the physical and social ruin of war is visible—in fact it forms the very fabric of the film.