The Story: When Akira Kurosawa was making One Wonderful Sunday, he was shooting out in the streets whenever possible, to show the desperation of ordinary lives in post-war Japan and to show the rubble, the conditions, the struggle to survive without means. But, not without hope. But, in its final act, it turns slightly surrealistic as the day is fading along with their dreams.
And, given the neo-realism that has gone before, Kurosawa did something drastic, like a last-ditch effort, to try and provide some hope for these two kids who have finally and seemingly irrevocably lost all of it. When you've lost all hope, even to dream, where can you turn for some solace and a rekindling?
He turned to the one thing that a movie always has but never acknowledges—its audience. Like Peter Pan on stage asking for applause to save the life of Tinkerbell, the woman who has been able to pull the man out of his despairs previously (but now cannot), turns to the audience from the screen and pleads to bring them some magic—the applause one would expect at the beginning of a concert—to start their imagining of a phantom performance of the music that they had intended to go see...but could not afford.
At that point, Kurosawa drops all the pretense—the imagined backdrop, the wind sound effects that were dubbed in, and hurtles his camera towards actress Chieko Nakakita to a tight close-up of her face as she addresses the camera—us—to provide the magic that they've run out of. No pretending anymore. This is serious.
It's also an instance of doing something one never does—if one wants to maintain the illusion of reality—and that is to break the invisible "fourth wall" that we, the audience, use to voyeuristically spy on the "lives" of people on stage or on-screen. It's a mind-snapping altering of roles between reality and illusion and participant and witness and it is best when used sparingly...or moments of great need.
It was daring then, and it is still daring—despite the deluge of on-screen narrators inhabiting films and TV these days. And it leads one to the inevitable conclusion that an audience is a movie's last hope.
As, indeed, we are.
The Set-Up: Two lovers, Yuso (Isao Numasaki) and Masako (Chieko Nakakita) take the public transportation to meet up in Tokyo to spend the day together. But, together, they only have 35 yen. They can dream, but all of their plans—for coffee, for finding a place to rent together, for going to a concert—are frustrated by their lack of funds. As their day ends, they find themselves at an abandoned amphitheater, and Yuso attempts to conduct a dream-symphony of the one they missed. But, they imagine no music, just the cold howling of the wind. Yuso despairs, and, for once, even Masako can't bring him out of it.
Action.
Words by Akira Kurosawa and Keinosuke Uekusa
Pictures by Asakazu Nakai and Akira Kurosawa
One Wonderful Sunday is available on DVD from The Criterion Collection.
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