Kurosawa's dreams

Reclaiming the Japanese master's late, great work

by Steve Vinberg

Akira Kurosawa's career as a filmmaker spanned a glorious half-century, but when movie buffs talk about his films, they generally refer to the classic period between Rashomon (1950) and Red Beard (1965) -- the Toshiro Mifune period. Mifune became Kurosawa's leading man after Drunken Angel, in 1948 (in which he played the second lead); he starred in 16 of the director's next 17 pictures, including The Seven Samurai, The Throne of Blood, The Lower Depths, and Yojimbo. Kurosawa seemed unthinkable without Mifune. But during the shooting of Red Beard, they quarreled and never collaborated again. Kurosawa's career seemed to come apart: his next film, Dodes'ka-den -- his first in color -- was undeservedly a box-office disaster, and he attempted suicide. And though he continued to make movies through 1993 (he died in 1998), the struggles he endured getting his work made and seen suggested that he never recovered the cachet he'd lost when he and Mifune parted ways. Sometimes the aid of Hollywood admirers like Francis Coppola and George Lucas was the only way he could find financing; his final movie, Madadayo, was never released in this country. (Turner Classic Movies screened it a few months ago.)

In light of how little attention has been afforded him the last two decades of his career, the Harvard Film Archive series "The Late Films of Akira Kurosawa" is a special boon. It includes all of his movies from Dodes'ka-den (January 14 at 9 p.m.) through the 1991 Rhapsody in August (January 16 at 6 p.m. and January 28 at 9:30 p.m.), as well as the Boston premiere of After the Rain (January 21 and 22 at 9:30 p.m.), which Takashi Koizumi directed from his last screenplay. The half-dozen Kurosawas in this retrospective are all rentable, but even letterboxed videos of these films are exasperating, since much of his genius was spatial, and he mined the resources of the wide screen, discovering its potential for narrative sweep, for dramatic irony, for exploring psychology, and for underscoring both the bond and the tension between character and environment. The scene in Ran (January 25 and 27 at 7 p.m.), Kurosawa's 1985 version of King Lear, where the racked old samurai lord Hidetora (Tatsuya Nakadai) sits immobile in his castle while flaming arrows whiz about his ears and his loyal soldiers die in a futile effort to protect him from his venomous sons has a power on the big screen that it can never regain on the small one. And the astounding shot in 1975's Dersu Uzala (January 17 at 7 p.m.) -- which is set in the forests and high grasses of Siberia early in the last century -- where we see the sun and the moon in the same huge sky, is so reduced on the TV screen as to be almost meaningless.

There's a lot of variety in these six films, but it's Ran and its predecessor, the 1980 Kagemusha ("The Shadow Warrior"; January 24 at 8 p.m. and 29 at 9 p.m.), that provide a definition of what film scholars usually mean when they allude to the late Kurosawa style. They're long (160 minutes), stately, and formal; they put more of a premium on traditional Japanese visual elements (symmetry, procession, distance) than the kinetic earlier work that made his reputation, and they unfold at a more leisurely pace. In these painterly movies Kurosawa concentrates more on camera than on editing, experimenting with ways of making the picture carry the dramatic burden. And since he's a dramatist to his bones, the experiment is a triumphant one. The first hour of Ran has few close-ups, so when Hidetora's castle is besieged at the outset of the second hour and the camera moves in on his anguish -- and the beginning of his madness -- the contrast is startling; despite the stylization of Nakadai's phenomenal performance, you find yourself brought into a shocking intimacy with the obstinate, decrepit old monarch. Kurosawa needs to effect this shift because if we don't identify with the protagonist and feel sorrow for him (what Shakespeare accomplishes through language), the story can't work emotionally. And yet Hidetora is essentially unlikable. The medieval Japanese setting requires a more brutal central figure than Lear: only a tyrant with a history of slaughtering his neighbors could have acquired so much territory.

Ran is a nuttier (and more ambitious) Shakespeare adaptation than Kurosawa's great Macbeth movie, Throne of Blood; Kagemusha is even more brilliant. The narrative premise is Borgesian. When the head of a powerful clan is mortally wounded, his confederates replace him with an exact physical double -- a thief they saved from crucifixion -- to keep him publicly alive until they can rout his enemies. And the unnamed double (another superb performance by Nakadai) grows into the role -- so much so that when he's liberated from it after three years, he wanders about aimlessly, sticking close to the clan, his life empty and undefined. In the movie's scheme all the main characters are in some way shadows of the dead Lord Shingen -- not only the thief, but Shingen's brother, who often served as his double while he was alive; his son, who feels he was always a feeble figure of his father and even now can't fight free of him; and his young grandson, the heir to the throne, who finds in the double a more loving grandfather than Shingen ever was.

The other epic in this collection is Dersu Uzala, a masterpiece but an uncategorizable one. It was shot in the USSR, and the actors speak Russian, not Japanese; the source material is Vladimir Arseniev's memoir of his days as an army scientist conducting topographical surveys of Siberia, and his relationship with his Siberian guide, Dersu Uzala (played by the gnomish, miraculously expressive Maxim Munzuk). Dersu teaches Arseniev to respect the living spirits in nature and at one juncture saves his life -- in a wondrous sequence -- by erecting a shelter of grass against a snowstorm that escalates seemingly out of nowhere, from flakes as minute as motes shimmering into prisms in the light of the drowning sun. This overwhelming movie is Kurosawa's most glorious paean to the exquisite and terrifying mysteries of nature. It's a lesson in perspective: the men are dwarfed against the frosted Siberian landscape. When Arseniev and his men leave Dersu to train back to the city, the soldiers' marching forms fill the screen; then they turn to bid their guide a final farewell and they're reminded of their place in the expanse as Dersu is framed in long shot against the immense horizon.

Kurosawa's focus on ecology, one of the passions of his old age, is more effective in Dersu Uzala than in Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (January 26 at 7 p.m. and January 30 at 8 p.m.) and Rhapsody in August, which came out in 1990 and 1991 respectively. Rhapsody in August may be his worst movie: a meditation on the bombing of Nagasaki, it reads as if it had been prepared for junior-high-school kids, with the characters talking in argumentative-essay paragraphs. There's one terrific image -- an old woman scrambling out across a field to meet her grandchildren in the rain, holding her umbrella aloft like a sail in the wind. Dreams is a series of eight sketches, and the last three are similarly preachy. They make Kurosawa look a little dotty, especially the finale, "Village of the Watermills," which posits a Lost Horizon vision of life in a pretty but rather numbing-seeming world where people live healthier, more fulfilling lives by ignoring modern technology -- such as, presumably, movie cameras. (They also live into their 90s and beyond, without the benefits of 20th-century medical science.)

It's worth dropping in to see Dreams, though, and then slipping out after the fourth episode -- just before Martin Scorsese shows up all bandaged up as van Gogh in "Crows." (Richard Gere makes an appearance in Rhapsody in August, but Scorsese's motormouth rusty-bearded Vincent is surely the casting error of a lifetime.) The first four "dreams" are tiny marvels -- especially "Sunshine Through the Rain," where a curious little boy sneaks to the forest in the rain and gets an illicit peek at the wedding procession of the foxes (played by masked actors), and "The Blizzard," where the deadly spirit of the storm is personified by a beautiful woman who covers her exhausted victims with a silvery robe. The first, with its blend of enchantment and fatalism, suggests Hans Christian Andersen; the second is more a folk fable; and "The Tunnel," which follows, is a ghost story where the specters of a battalion lost in battle re-emerge to face their remorseful commander, who sent them out to their deaths.

The aura of fairy tales can be felt in several parts of these late Kurosawas -- the scene in Kagemusha where the double, unaware that Shingen has died, tries to rob the palace and encounters the dead lord encased in a shroud is like something out of The Arabian Nights. Dodes'ka-den is set in a poverty-stricken section of Tokyo, but it too might have been penned by Andersen. You can sense his presence particularly in the scenes between the father and son who live in an abandoned car and live on the scraps the boy begs from nearby restaurants and geisha houses -- and on the verbal images the father paints as he describes their fantasy house. The characters in Dodes'ka-den are blighted by a combination of misfortune and their own inability to give word to their needs and desires; they're strangely like the cursed children of the Depression in Dennis Potter's Pennies from Heaven. The poet dreamer is so pathologically shy that even when his child is dying of food poisoning and starvation, he can't summon up the courage to beg in his place. A young woman, the victim of her drunken uncle's lust and indolence, is so alienated from her own feelings that she ends up stabbing the only person who treats her with kindness. And a cuckolded husband, literally blinded by bitterness, has moved so far beyond human connection that when his wife returns, humbling herself to him, he's no longer capable of acknowledging her.

The utterly amazing Dodes'ka-den, which has some of the most penetrating stylized acting you're ever likely to see, is in its way as much an oddball masterwork as Dersu Uzala. In these late films Kurosawa inhabits a different realm -- more panoramic, more rarefied, more mystical. They complete the magnificent paradox of his long career, which rose out of the East, touched the West in ways that no previous or subsequent Japanese filmmaker ever has, being inspired by Shakespeare, Hollywood, the detective novel, and then arced gracefully, surprisingly back to the culture of his birth.