Lost In Translation

Madadayo

Madadayo (1993) is Akira Kurosawa’s 31^st and final film. It is the story of a beloved professor and author’s last years after he retires as a professor. His former students begin to hold an annual party for him on his birthday where they ask him if he’s ready yet “Mou ii ka?” and he responds by saying not yet “Mada dayo!” It starts in 1943 where the professor’s home is burned down in the fire bombings of Tokyo, through the occupation, and economic recovery and ends in 1960.  This film is significant in that Kurosawa uses natural depictions of the changing of the seasons and nature in a naturalistic manner, which is a departure for him. Nature has always had dramatic implications in the work of Kurosawa.  It seems to be a fitting finale for one of the century’s great auteurs. 

I Live In Fear

The last film in the Kurosawa Post War Eclipse series is I Live in Fear; also know as Record of A Living Being (1955).  Toshiro Mifune plays a wealthy industrialist that is obsessed with nuclear destruction.  He is convinced the world will end in flames, and wants to move his large family (he has at least two other children born out of wedlock with mistresses).  He has already started construction on an underground bunker in Amori that he has abandoned for the Brazil plan and his family is trying to get him declared incompetent so they can save the family business, a foundry.  The film shows the chotei (Family Court) process which ends with the father reluctantly being declared incompetent. I guess Kurosawa is trying to show that the only sane man is treated as being insane, but it is hard to for me to be sympathetic to him, Mifune is all swagger playing out of character by 20-30 years of age. To be honest, I think this was my least favorite film in the series.  They are all interesting in what they say about Kurosawa’s vision of the world, but I think The Idiot was probably the best made film in the series despite the length and lack of a director’s cut..

The Idiot

Akira Kurosawa’s adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel, The Idiot, from Eclipse Series 7: Postwar Kurosawa, was the follow up to the internationally acclaimed Rashomon.  It is an unusual film one that reportedly edited down from 4 and a half hours to 166 minutes.  That’s still quite a chore for me, I watched it in intervals, but I have to say that there are some amazing sequences and a compelling story of love, desire and will in winter wilds of Hokkaido.  I have read in his autobiography that he was a huge fan of Dostoyevsky.  However, I can’t report on how closely it follows, the book however it has been said that he follows the story quite closely. I have only tackled Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and Notes From the Underground back in my ambitious undergraduate days.  Although, I must say this inspires me to pick up The Idiot at some point.

Scandal

Scandal was made the same year as his breakthrough masterpiece, Rashomon in1950, but is considered a lesser work (Eclipse Series 7: Postwar Kurosawa).  However, it is revealing about Kurosawa’s view of morality, society, and overall worldview.  He sees that he new found individualism and freedom if unchecked can cause some problems and it seems as if he has had his share of problems with the press.  It is a depiction of American values that have been absorbed through the occupation, Mifune rides an American motorcycle and we often hear American music.  The story is about a libel reported by a gossip magazine about a liaison between Mifune, who portrays a famous artist and a singer. He hires a down and out lawyer, expertly played by Kurosawa regular Takashi Shimura, with an ailing daughter.  It is minor Kurosawa but interesting in what it reveals about the filmmaker in context of his oeuvre.

No Regrets For Our Youth

No Regrets for Youth (1946), part of the Criterion Collection Eclipse Series: 7 Postwar Kurosawa, was Kurosawa’s first post war film. It seems more straightforward politically than most of his other films.  It was also his first film with a female protagonist who develops from a spoiled daughter who is frivolous and selfish into an independent social activist.  It is essentially an anti-nationalist film that praises the intellectual freedom of thought from before the war.  It follows a group of students and their professor who is removed from his post at Kyoto University due to his political beliefs.  His daughter Yukie falls for one of the anti-imperialistic students who is from peasant stock.  She learns from his selfless activism to contribute to the betterment of society.  This is a recurring theme in the work of Kurosawa who seems to promote the idea of individual responsibility for the betterment of society in general.  This is a theme he will explore in several later works like Stray Dog, The Seven Samurai, Drunken Angel, High And Low, Ikiru, and Red Beard among others.

DVD Extras: I Live In Fear

Criterion has released a five film collection of lesser-known post-war Akira Kurosawa films from the new Eclipse series. One of them, I Live in Fear (aka Record of a Living Being), is discussed in Slate's DVD Extra's column. The writer draws parallels between the film and the psychic effect of post-9/11 life:

In the United States, a couple years after I Live in Fear came out in Japan, Norman Mailer wrote an essay called "The White Negro," which began: "Probably we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years." Mailer was celebrating a new type of person, the hipster—the "American existentialist" or "white Negro"—who responded to this fate with rebellion. But the vast majority of people, in America, Japan, and probably everywhere, kept going to work and paying their bills as they always had. Kurosawa captured the "psychic havoc" on that side of the fence—and what happens when one otherwise upstanding citizen snaps out of the spell, stares into the abyss, and feels in his bones there's no way out.

In the weeks and months after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, many of us, especially in New York City, feared to ride the subway, shuddered at strangely shaped bags, conjured mushroom clouds over the Empire State Building, and contemplated moving, if not to Brazil, then at least across the Tappan Zee Bridge, where life might be safer. But at some point, we put the fear aside, ignored it, or suppressed it as the only way to snap back into some semblance of normalcy.

This is the turbulent terrain that an American update of I Live in Fear—a film about our own "psychic havoc"—might cover and somehow dramatize: the line between obsession and obliviousness, between whimpering terror and blithe denial; the undeterminable toll on our "unconscious minds" from embracing either course; and the question of whether it's possible to lead a fully conscious, sane life on some road in between.

Drunken Angel

Criterion has recently released some of Akira Kurosawa’s postwar films; one of the more notable films is Drunken Angel, which marks his first collaboration with Toshiro Mifune. I must say it is a distinctive Kurosawa film with his visual metaphors (in this films a filthy stagnant swamp), powerful Shakespearian weather, and interesting camera staging and angles. I must say that I also like it when Kurosawa works in the film noir genre (Stray Dog, The Bad Sleep Well, High and Low), since it has a slightly different context than the traditional western execution of the genre. It is the tale of a flawed but vigilant moralistic hero played by Kurosawa regular Takashi Shimura (Seven Samurai, Ikiru, Stray Dog, etc…)-a doctor who is also a drunk. He tries to save a low level yakuza, Matsunaga (Mifune) who he sees a bit of his gruff younger self in. Matsunaga is suffering from TB and is struggling to maintain his position with the yakuza after an old boss (Reisaburo Yamamoto) arrives back on the scene after a spell in jail. I have to say that I appreciated the breezy pace for a Kurosawa film-it runs just over 90 minutes (98 minutes).

The Bad Sleep Well

The Bad Sleep Well is one of Kurosawa's social problem films that takes place in a contemporary setting, which allows him to explore the theme of corruption. It has been somewhat of a surprise when I first started viewing Kurosawa's films to see the western influence in his films. generally he takes a western concept, theme, or story and puts it through his own cultural filter. Thus, Hamlet, becomes the story template in which Kurosawa explores the idea of corruption, revenge, and justice. It has been said that MacBeth and hamlet were Kurosawa's two favorite Shakespeare plays, and his homage to MacBeth is the excellent samurai film Throne of Blood, and Ran is his interpretation of King Lear as well. The film's content and themes also reflect a debt to film noir, as corruption, intrigue, and payback figure into the storyline's plot. It's interesting to see how he employs aspects of Hamlet in the film. For example, at the wedding of Nishi and the boss' daughter, Nishi has a cake replica of the office building with a black roses coming form the window and floor of the building where Nishi's father was pushed from the window sent to the wedding in order to judge from the reactions of he guests who is guilty-much like the play within a play in Hamlet. I think Kurosawa was making films in an era where people were patient enough to sit through a 2 hour plot driven film without complaint. I find it a bit trying given my MTV generation attention span. However, I found it to be an interesting production, although it isn't one of my favorites, but it is punctuated with many familiar Kurosawa conceits like the powerful rain, musical motifs, and his impressive framing of dramatic shots. This film was made in 1960, but Kurosawa doesn't dismiss the past so easily; much of the action takes place at a bombed out factory a remnant form the war where Nishi and his friend had worked and survived on the sale of black market oil. It's not a major key to the plot, but it shows Kurosawa's acknowledgement of hard times that had been overcome. But at what price? These men did what they had to do to survive, however the corrupt businessmen are not only lining their pockets but murdering people to keep it covered up. There's always something interesting to look at in a Kurosawa film-likewise he often gives you something interesting to think about as well.

DVD Notes: Red Beard

I recently watched Akira Kurosawa’s Red Beard (1968), inspired by the novel of the same name by Shugoro Yamamoto, which is a watershed film for several reasons. For one, it is the last black and white film made by Kurosawa, it is the last collaboration between Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune, and it is a culmination of the humanistic side of Kurosawa that is reflected in other films like Stray Dog and High And Low. It is set at the end of the Tokugawa period when a young doctor Yasumoto (Yuzo Kayama) returns from study with the Dutch in Nagasaki and stops at the Koshikawa Public Clinic, to pay his respects to the director known as red beard (Mifune) and finds out that he is to work there. (Side note: Koshikawa is the district next to Kohinata in Bunkyo-ku where I live, and there is a Koshikawa Clinic there still today!) During the course of the film, he learns to accept his role there and learns compassion from his master Red Beard as he reaches a higher level of consciousness and lives to help others. There’s a subplot in which he helps a traumatized youngster recover that was inspired by the Dostoyevsky novel, The Insulted And The Injured, Kurosawa was a big Dostoevsky fan. The film is known for it’s elaborate set that was authentic to the architecture and materials used to make houses more than a hundred years ago. The film is epic in its themes, story, and execution. It is almost 3 hours long and has an intermission, but was interesting in the context of the other Kurosawa films I have been watching, as themes emerge and I begin to recognize different actors portraying widely different characters.

DVD Notes: High And Low

Last night I watched Akira Kurosawa’s film noir High and Low (1963), which was based on Ed McBain’s detective novel, King’s Ransom. The first part of the film is concerned with setting up the kidnapping and moral dilemma faced by the main protagonist Kingo Gondo. After the ransom has been paid, the rest of the film is devoted to the detective work that will bring the criminal to justice. In this sense, it is similar to Stray Dog in that it shows Kurosawa’s fascination with the intricacies of police work as we move step by step with the police as they draw closer to the capture of the kidnapper/murderer. However, since this is Kurosawa, there is more at play than a simple who dunnit. High and Low refers to the class status of the victim and criminal, Gondo lives high up on a bluff overlooking Yokohoma, while the under class toils in the valley below trapped in sweltering heat, while Gondo enjoys the high life in his air conditioned villa high above the city. But there is a distinction between Gondo and the other executives who force him out of his job, Gondo make the right moral decision to save the boy who is not his son and garners the respect of the public, furthermore, he is a craftsman who is drive to work and create quality shoes useful to society. The murderer is driven by a sense of outrage-why does Gondo get to live high above the bluff while he must toil away as a an intern in the valley below. We are never given the back story of the criminal who request to speak with Gondo before he is executed at he end-Kurosawa uses a sort of mirror technique in the window to show that their fates are intertwined as a sort of doppelganger like Yusa, the criminal, and Murakami, the cop, in Stray Dog. Gondo also came from humble beginnings and built himself up, but could have become resentful and negative like Takeguchi. In addition, it was interesting to see the use of heroin in the henchmen who Takeguchi kills by giving them pure heroin so that they overdose saving his alibi; this is where the film goes even lower. The café where the score takes place is a jazz joint full of foreigners-it is sort of shocking to see such a modern setting for a Kurosawa film since I have been watching so many period pieces in the last year. This criterion collection DVD has no special features, just a new transfer. Minor Kurosawa, but still interesting to watch.