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Masahiro Shinoda comes to Harvard
BY CHRIS FUJIWARA
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"Double Shinoda"
Double Suicide (1969; 104 minutes), May 14 at 8 p.m. at Yenching Auditorium, 2 Divinity Avenue in Harvard Square. Spy Sorge (2003; 182 minutes), May 16 at 7 p.m. at the Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy Street in Harvard Square. Both in Japanese with English subtitles. Presented by the Japan Society of Boston, the Harvard Film Archive, and the Reischauer Institute at Harvard University.
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The career of director Masahiro Shinoda resists being simplified into a start-out-radical, end-up-conservative trajectory. A contemporary of Nagisa Oshima (In the Realm of the Senses) and Shohei Imamura (The Profound Desire of the Gods), Shinoda was, like those two, noted in the ’60s for his aesthetic radicalism. What becomes clearer in retrospect is the depth of his commitment to a historical examination of Japanese politics and ideology. This weekend, Harvard will screen two of his films, and he will be present to discuss his work. Double Suicide, Shinoda’s best-known film (at least in the West), is a live-action version of an 18th-century bunraku (puppet) play by Monzaemon Chikamatsu about an Osaka paper merchant, Jihei, who has fallen in love with the courtesan Koharu. Because Jihei is married, and because he is too poor to "redeem" Koharu by paying her debts to her handlers, the couple’s love is hopeless, and they vow to commit suicide together. The shallow-focus, high-contrast black-and-white cinematography marks a modernity further highlighted by three innovations Shinoda brings to the play. First, he starts the film with a prologue showing the backstage preparations for a bunraku performance while, on the soundtrack, a man and a woman discuss their plans for making the film Double Suicide. Second, throughout the film, the characters are shadowed by a group of black-garbed stagehands whom they don’t acknowledge and who stand for the inexorability of tragedy while registering a mute protest against it. Third, the same actress, the superb Shima Iwashita, plays both the courtesan and Jihei’s wife — a casting coup that strengthens the play’s feminist current. Shinoda’s Spy Sorge is probably the most exhaustive film account to date of the life of Richard Sorge, a person so interesting that I’m surprised more movies haven’t been made about him. (Veit Harlan, notorious as the director of the 1940 anti-Semitic film Jud süß, made a film about Sorge, Verrat an Deutschland, in 1954; a French film, Qui êtes-vous, Monsieur Sorge?, directed by Yves Ciampi, appeared in 1961.) Wounded fighting for the Kaiser in World War I, Sorge, the son of a German father and a Russian mother, became a committed Marxist during his convalescence. Undercover as a German news correspondent, he gathered intelligence for the Soviets in Shanghai in the early ’30s, then was sent to Japan, where he kept Moscow informed about Japan’s foreign policy. In 1941, he passed on to his masters the news that Japan had no intention of attacking the Soviet Union. This information enabled the Soviets to redeploy enough troops from Siberia to repel the German invasion. (Earlier, Sorge had got wind of Hitler’s plans to invade Russia and warned Moscow, but Stalin ignored him.) In October 1941, he was arrested by the Japanese secret service; he was hanged in 1944. In Spy Sorge, Shinoda shows all this and more, mostly in the form of a long flashback narrated by Sorge after his capture. The best thing about the movie is its obsession with historical detail, which extends to its CGI-laden re-creation of Tokyo in the 1930s. This scrupulousness becomes, however, a drawback, since it leads Shinoda to underdramatize his story. Iain Glen’s low-key portrayal of Sorge as a rueful rogue would have been more impressive if he had been given more to build it on than stray hints of alcoholism, womanizing, and feelings of guilt. Sorge’s most prominent associates, Japanese journalist Hotsumi Ozaki and American radical Agnes Smedley, are potentially fascinating figures who come across as ciphers. Even at its three-hour length, the film feels truncated: many short scenes lead nowhere, as if they were the vestiges of subplots that had got discarded somewhere between first rewrite and final cut. I wouldn’t mind German and Russian characters all speaking English if the dialogue weren’t so stilted. Yet Spy Sorge has a wintry plainness appropriate to a farewell: Shinoda has said that this will be his last film.
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