Walking Kurosawa's Road: Ikiru

The inability to write about the films of Akira Kurosawa to my satisfaction led me to to take a different path: start at the beginning, take each film in sequence, one after the other, and watch the progression of the man from film-maker to Master. I'm hoping I can write more intelligently and more knowledgeably about his work by, step by step, Walking Kurosawa's Road.


Ikiru (aka "To Live" aka 生きる)(Akira Kurosawa, 1952) For those who've seen more than just Akira Kurosawa's samurai films, this is the one that is most often cited as his crowning achievement.

Hard to argue.

Short on visual majesty, except in the sort of composition and eye for detail that Kurosawa brought to every film, with very little of what one would call "action," and inspired by the director's love for Russian Literature, Ikiru tells the story of a simple bureaucrat, a paper-shuffler, "a walking corpse," as the narrator describes "the protagonist." 

Set in contemporary Japan, it follows Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura), a Kainan civil servant (with the uninspiring title of "Section Chief of Public Affairs") who has worked for the same department for 30 years and who (we are told) has been "dead for twenty years"—that's around the time his last white paper on steps to improve efficiency in his department was summarily dismissed by his "higher-ups".

We see a typical day at his office. Kanji rubber-stamping papers with barely a glance, the same way that he handles a request from Sakai (Haruo Tanaka) about the concerns of the Kuroe Women's Association—they want to drain a local cess-pool and create a children's park on the site, eliminating a health hazard and providing a benefit for Japan's version of "baby-boomers." Kanji basically runner-stamps them, sending them off to Public Works without any sort of entree or recommendation, where the mothers go through an all-day session of bureaucracy runarounds only to end up exactly where they started. 

Only when they return to his desk, Kanji is not there—he has uncharacteristically taken time off from his duties to go to the physician's office. He has certain symptoms—pains—which a fellow patient in the waiting room tells him could be stomach cancer, which is a death sentence. But (he's informed), the doctors, who wouldn't be able to treat the cancer, will tell him that it's merely a mild ulcer, there's no need to operate, and to eat whatever he wants (as long as it's easy to digest). The patient tells him that is his experience, and when Kanji is called to the doctor's office, his worst fears are answered. He's told he has a mild ulcer, there's no need to operate, and he can eat anything he wants (as long as it's easy to digest). That patient was telling the truth; the doctors will lie. His diagnosis is good news; it is a death sentence. The doctors can only watch as their cheery "spin" fills Kanji with despair. They know he is suffering, but they go on with their charade. That is how things are done, you see. To deviate from it might be disastrous.

At the doctor's office, Kanji has been given a taste of his own medicine and it is a bitter pill. He knows he has less than a year to live, but he has no idea how. Living has become a habit, something he has squandered, and, in his grief, he takes things to excess. "What would you do," his doctor asks his team after he's left "if you had only six moths to live?" Kanji staggers home, oblivious to the world, only to hear his son and his new wife arrive home, speculating on buying a new home with his money, and he recalls himself as a widower, raising the boy himself, the sacrifices, and can only cry himself to sleep.

The next day, he is not at work, nor is he for the next five days—¥50,000 has been taken out of his account—but no one can find him. It turns out he's been drowning his sorrows, pretty stupid for a man with stomach cancer, but the sake gives him oblivion and oblivion takes away the thoughts in his head—of his wasted life, his contemplation of suicide and his cowardice for not doing it. He blurts all this to a writer "of second-rate fiction" who finds Kanji's existential struggle romantic and vows to help him start living by taking him to pachinko parlors, cabarets, dance-halls and strip-joints, but it is all just drunken activity that only makes him feel worse. He is running in place and getting nowhere.

Still recovering from his night's activities with the writer, he has a chance encounter with a co-worker (Miki Odagiri) who is overjoyed to see him. Feeling stifled by the job at Public Affairs, she was been wanting to quit but has needed his permission signed to begin work at a new job making children's toys. Watanabe takes her to his house to provide the needed seal for her petition, but the girl's presence makes the old man's son think that his father is foolishly stepping out with a younger woman, risking his inheritance. But, Watanabe, feeling isolated and alone, is merely clinging to her for her vitality and energy. She makes him laugh and ultimately inspires him to start a new path...in the same place where he began, where he feels he's been wasting his life for the last 30 years. But, that will all change.

At this point, Kurosawa changes the strict timeline he's been following and moves forward five months in the story. Watanabe is dead and at his memorial, his family and past employees gather in remembrance. Even the Deputy Mayor is there. The children's park has been built, which the Deputy Mayor is only too proud to take credit for, dismissing Watanabe's efforts. But, a grateful appearance at the wake by the Kuroe Women's Association seems to belie that, and Watanabe's co-workers, perhaps inspired by the generous rounds of warm sake, begin to swap stories of Watanabe's zeal in his last few months, uncharacteristically bending rules, hounding department heads and getting the park built.

Watanabe at his lowest...and his highest.

"But I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.

To the point of even having his life threatened by local pimps who'd rather use the designated park-area for their own purposes. When they threaten retribution, he only looks at them with an ironic smile, at the joke only he can appreciate. By the end of the movie, the characters begin to appreciate the value of one, solitary life, however humble, however stifled. Appreciate it, but in a bureaucracy, maybe not inspired by it. Maybe.

 

But, the park is there. And it will be well-used, as Watanabe himself used it. No further marker is needed.

Ikiru is a quieter, less celebratory—and less dependent on angels, certainly—cousin to It's a Wonderful Life or A Christmas Carol (any of them). All tread a journey through darkness and the sorrow of the soul to emerge, at their respective ends, to the light and a celebration of life. It's why I offer this one for Christmas. As a sort of gift.

I can't recommend this one highly enough. I borrowed this from the Library and kept it for two months, revisiting it, picking details out of it, admiring how it blended tragedy and comedy, satire and spiritualism. If there was one Kurosawa film that I could choose in his entire work that I could view over and over again, it would be this lovely little miracle of a film.

It was remade (as, it seems, all of Kuosawa's films must) in 2022 as the quite decent British film, Living.

Kainan City Hall

 

The Green Slime

Saturday is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day. We'll need an extra leak-proof liner for this one.

The Green Slime (Kinji Fukasaku, 1968)  "The Green Slime ARE Coming?" Shouldn't that be "The Green Slime IS Coming?"

 

Well, believe me, the poster grammar is the least of this movie's problems. 

 

The Green Slime was an indirect follow-up to four low-budget Italian science fiction films* entailing a future Earth space station called Gamma One. The same models were used for the miniatures, but the station was re-christened Gamma Three, and the script and financing were provided by M-G-M in the U.S. The film was made in Japan, directed by Kinji Fukasaku with a Japanese crew and starring Western actors Robert Horton, Luciana Paluzzi and Richard Jaeckel, as well as control rooms full of ex-pat Western actors and U.S. military crew stationed in Japan. As the film was intended for international markets, they didn't bother doing sound recording while filming, so that everything—and I mean everything—was dubbed later on in a studio. It's just one of the things that gives the film a bizarre feeling of desperation.

Seems Earth has a problem: the asteroid Flora 80 is on a collision course with our planet and if it's allowed to hit it will create "an extinction-level" event. Ben Affleck not being born yet, and Robert Duvall unavailable trying to get James Caan on the Moon in Countdown, the Space Command sends Commander Jack Rankin (Horton) to Gamma Three to "blast the thing out of the sky" to which Rankin replies with a stalwart "thumbs up"—his go-to when he's trying to be positive.

When he gets to the station, he immediately shoves the station's in-command, Commander Vince Elliott (Jaeckel) out of rank, saying that until the asteroid's out of the way that he's in command of the station (dammit!) and anybody doesn't like it, well, there's the airlock outside over there. Vince sucks it up, this being an emergency and all...and because he's now involved with Rankin's old girlfriend, Dr. Lisa Benson (Paluzzi), who's in charge of "Medical" there on the station, so, hey Vince is "one-up" on Rankin.

Rankin, Elliott, and a team of technicians set off for the asteroid Flora, land and begin setting explosive charges to blast the thing out of the sky (as per orders), but inquisitive scientist Dr. Hans Halvorsen (Ted Gunther) finds some green goo that he just finds fascinating and wants to take a sample to examine aboard the station ("New life" and all that...). But, Rankin, knowing full-well that they're sitting on a "ticking time-bomb" nixes any "shilly-shallying" from egg-head scientists and knocks the container out of Halvorsen's grasp. 

Yee-ahhh, about those command skills. Good instincts, but bad technique. The sample shatters and some of that glop falls on one of the crew's suits, allowing it to get onboard the station, where, because it feeds on energy (allowing it to survive on a rock in space, I suppose), the station's decontamination procedures only manages to feed it, and make it grow into big, bulbous, one eyed creatures with claw-arms (ELECTRICAL claw-arms!) that wouldn't have passed the laugh-test for the show-runner of the really early "Doctor Who" shows.

Of course, they need time to grow from their ooze-state, so much time is spent monitoring Flora blowing up, and having a celebratory soiree where the music ain't good and the dancing's even worse, but given enough of that 1960's movie staple, the gyrating posterior shot. And, it gives Rankin, Elliott and Benson a chance to spell out everything they already know about each other, and for Rankin to pull a dick-move and ask Benson for a slow-dance right in front of her current lover. Everybody's probably wondering how soon they can get this jerk off the station!

But, no such luck! Pretty soon, the lights start flickering, which can only mean one thing! The Power station! And something's wrong! They find the burned still-smoking corpse of one of the technicians and Benson displays her considerable medical knowledge by announcing "He's dead." But, no time for mourning yet, kids, because one of those bulbous Green-Slime things is just around a conduit and starts to whip those electric arms around, killing a bunch of anonymous guys with ray-guns and football helmets. The lasers can't kill it, and if the thing bleeds, it just makes more of them, so the best the station can do is try to isolate the things...except...they forget about the station's ventilating system. Pretty soon, the things are schlumpfing all over the station, even in the hospital.

Since the things eats energy, laser guns have little lasting effect, so the best alternative is right out of the Superman TV-Villain handbook: to throw something at it, like hospital beds (they use a lot of those, it seems to be the most effective weapon), or if your laser gun—which only makes them stronger, remember—jams or runs out of...laser, I suppose**...you can throw that at them, too. If it jams in their eye, it's quite effective, apparently.

I mock, of course, because there is no way one could confuse this with high art—this came out the same year, and from the same studio, as 2001: a Space Odyssey (which was intended to be "the proverbial good science-fiction movie")—and The Green Slime has all the hallmarks of the proverbial bad sci-fi flick—the antiseptic art design, the "best-we-can-do" special effects, the stentorian acting (to keep from laughing), and a sensibility that can best be described as—to use a highfalutin' word—"puerile."*** That means it would merely impress children...or the child-like. I'm way past that sell-date to be impressed.

There are some notable things about it however. It's one of the few screen credits of William Finger, who spent most of his life in obscurity writing for comic books. Obscure, except for one co-creation of great significance for which he was denied credit for decades (until recently, that is). Bill Finger, along with artist Bob Kane, co-created the character of "Batman." That Batman. He wrote a lot of the defining stories of the Batman character (as well as co-creating Robin, Alfred, and quite a few of the major villains) from its origins in 1939 through to the 1960's. At least, he got credit for The Green Slime.

The director, Kinji Fukasaku, had been directing for seven years and really wasn't a slouch and was quite highly regarded. In fact, the next year, he replaced Akira Kurosawa (!!) as the director of the Japanese sequences of Tora! Tora! Tora! (!!!) and in 2000, he would write and direct a genuine classic, Battle Royale, which, whether directly or indirectly, served as inspiration for "The Hunger Games" series.

Another amazing fact and landmark about it is this: The Green Slime was the first movie skewered on "Mystery Science Theater 3000", serving as the show's pilot episode. If, for nothing else (okay...for nothing else), it has some significance.

* The first of the series was Wild, Wild Planet...or as it's known in Italy, I Criminali Della Galassia ("Criminals of the Galaxy").

** Or..maybe...the animator who draws the laser beams runs out of ink. 

 

*** See what passes for women's fashion in these things—short skirts, tight, shimmery fabrics, nothing you'd want to wear.  

 

Yeah. No. No, really.

 

Olde Review: Fires on the Plains

This was part of a series of reviews of the ASUW Film series back in the '70's. Except for some punctuation, I haven't changed anything from the way it was presented, giving the snarky, clueless kid I was back in the '70's a break. Any stray thoughts and updates I've included with the inevitable asterisked post-scripts and, here, it's in the familiar, gray, non-oxidized font.

 

This is a companion piece to "Forbidden Games" broadcast on KCMU-FM.

 
This Saturday's ASUW films in 130 Kane at 7:30pm are the last of the Fall series, and they are Rene Clement's Forbidden Games and Kon Ichikawa's Fires on the Plains. They look at the effects of war on children and men.

Fires on the Plains aka "Nobi" (Kon Ichikawa, 1959) Kon Ichikawa's Fires on the Plain is not so gentle as Forbidden Games — it is something that pretty much has to be endured. It deals with the final days of World War II and the ravaged Japanese Army—disorganized, suffering heavy losses, and losing its humanity. The conditions under which they fight are unbearable: disease is rampant, there is no food and no loyalty and no real reason to keep fighting but to survive. Ichikawa focuses on one soldier who, too, is trying to survive, but survive as a moral being, for he is already doomed by tuberculosis.

 

On his trek through the war-zone, the atrocities he sees become greater, the desperation he sees heightens until there are no sides. The war becomes one to survive, each on his own against everyone else. There is no meaning to the war, and also, no meaning to life for all morality, if it can exist in war, is lost. The ending of Fires is horribly shocking and if your are in no mood, or cannot take such strong stuff, I would advise you to avoid seeing the film. The total effect is somewhat devastating and probably Fires on the Plain is the most excruciating indictment of war and the effect on the men caught up in it.

It is interesting to set this film up against Ichikawa's beautiful The Burmese Harp, which looks at the same section of the war for the Japanese. But one gets the impression that, for Ichikawa, The Burmese Harp didn't express enough of the outrage he felt for war. The Burmese Harp looks positively sublime next to Fires on the Plain, and even though they touch on the same themes, the two films could not be more different. Just looking at stills from Fire is a bit grueling, but this review whets my appetite to see it again, especially in light of another, similar film, Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima, and in the light of encountering The Burmese Harp and appreciating its artistry.

As I tended to do, I truncated these reviews as they were the final ones for the quarter, and I wanted to make room for closing thoughts:

"Forbidden Games" and "Fires on the Plain" are the last films in the Fall ASUW Film Series, and so, too, this is my last movie review. At this point, KCMU is in a state of flux so I have no idea whether I will be back next quarterwith the Winter ASUW Film reviews, or whether we will have film reviews at all. It's pretty much up in the air right now. I would like to see things continue. I have had fun doing them: seeing new films that I might have missed, allowing myself to express my raves and my gripes about them. The toughest thing about writing them is to distill what you want to say about a film into five minutes, two and a half minutes, or even one minute; time is always the biggest enemy in radio work and that proved to be the case not only writing in writing them, but in producing them, as well. I felt that something else had to be included besides my droning on—at least music, maybe an actuality now and then—and that was time-consuming. A few times my reviews would be late (once it just never went on) and again, time—my time—will be the biggest consideration of whether they will continue. But whatever the fate of the reviews next quarter, the films will continue. And this is the line-up for Winter Quarter....

...I would like to thank the DJ's on the air for even playing the damn things: Tim Hunter, Don Zwicker, Steve Flume, John Windus, and Abby Goldman. I would like to thank Diane Jotautus of the Audio-Visual department who put up with me all these weeks, for letting me see the films, and I'd like to thank Rajeeve Gupta of the Film Showings Committee for giving me the opportunity. Lastly, I'd like to thank you, for these reviews do no good unless someone is out there listening. And so, that's the Last Movie Review Show.

I felt compelled to say all that because 1) I felt a great deal of responsibility for these things, and 2) I had enough ego to think anybody gave a rip. I still have trouble compressing my thoughts into a cogent, pithy review that manages to touch on all the issues a film brings up. But, I've also learned that there's just so much of this stuff a person can tolerate (and how long has this one gone on?) The comment about my droning on is on-the-beam—back then, I didn't know how to speak on the radio,it was all just a flat monotone in desperate need of some character. 

The names I remember fondly. Tim Hunter went on to a successful career as "the funny one" on a morning DJ team locally, John Windus ended up working in radio in the Portland area. Everyone else...long-lost, though I still remember them in my mind's eye. I remember after a while I started calling Abby, Abby "Gold-person" as a joke, which she picked up and used on the air. Diane Jotautus was a great supervisor—I worked for her in the A-V Department, and gave it up to concentrate my time doing radio—and more often than not, would watch the films with me to break up the monotony of the office-work. It was also a quick way to check the prints that were showing.

And I did do the Winter series. Some of them have already appeared, and I know there are others...but the notebook I have of all these old reviews doesn't contain them. I've done a thorough search for any loose-leaf versions, but I have yet to find them. It's amazing how long I've kept these things I've written 32 years ago....scratch that, make it nearly 50 years ago.

 

That's a lot of time spent in the dark.

Godzilla Minus One

Banzai, Toho!

or

Kurosawa's Post-War Giant Lizard Movie

 

Kamikazi pilot Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) does something very unusual for a pilot of his duty. He lands his bomber on Odo Island for repairs at the remote Navy Air Service base. But, there's nothing to repair. The lead mechanic Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki) diplomatically approaches the pilot, telling him that he could find nothing apparently wrong with the plane. "What are you implying?" Shikishima replies defensively. "I'm on your side," deflects Tachibana. "You landed this bucket of bolts on this swiss-cheese of a runway. We need more people like you. Why 'die honorably?'" But, Shikishima only feels shame and regret—his very existence is evidence of his cowardice and his turning back on his duty. He is in an existential nightmare.

 

But, it will only get worse. 

 

Shikishima has noticed some usually-deep-water fish dead on the surface waters surrounding Odo Island. It's an odd mystery until it gets dark. Then a roar erupts from the waves and an out-sized dinosaur creature lumbers onto the beach and quickly takes out a reconnaissance tower "Godzilla" one of the mechanics murmurs. "What is it?" Shikishima asks in terror.

 

"Nobody knows."

And, ultimately, it doesn't matter. Shikishima will sneak to his plane, but when he has the creature in his sights, he freezes, causing a panicking technician to prematurely...and ineffectually...fire his rifle, attracting the beast's attention and provoking an attack. Shikishima runs from the plane just as Godzilla stomps on it, exploding the plane and knocking Shikishima out. When he recovers, all save for Tachibana are dead, and he accuses the pilot of cowardice, blaming the deaths on him, and vindictively giving him a packet of the dead engineers' photographs as a reminder of his weakness.

Ultimately, Shikishima returns home to Tokyo after the war, only to find it in ruins from U.S. fire-bombing, his parents dead, and his reputation as a kamikazi in tatters and himself a symbol of scorn. He does not argue, he does not fight back, as he is in utter agreement with the sentiment. He has failed in what he sees as his duty twice and his survivor's guilt is near crippling. It becomes a matter of survival, and refugees are trying to scratch out a living any way they can under U.S. occupation. It's how the young pilot becomes the care-taker of a beggar-woman, Noriko Oishi (Minami Hamabe) and the orphan-child Akiko that she has promised its dying mother to raise. But, he sees his role as merely charitable: there is no romance between Kōichi and Noriko as he does not think he deserves such happiness, nor would he disgrace Noriko by becoming her husband. For him, the war is not over. It may never be. It lives with him still.

But, he needs a job. He takes one clearing the Sea of Japan of American and Japanese mines on a "specially made" ship—which turns out to be a converted wooden fishing vessel, the Shinsei Maru—the wooden structure won't attack magnetic mines, and he finds his gunnery experience useful in detonating the cut mines. With him are the ship's captain Yōji Akitsu (Kuranosuke Sasaki), Shirō Mizushima (Yuki Yamada), and former Naval engineer Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka) and the crew form a bond, albeit a cynical one in their work of destroying the two nation's defenses.

Unbeknownst to them, the U.S. is doing further tests of the nuclear capabilities that brought Japan to its knees, and, with the war over, they're testing them on islands in the Pacific. The consequences will be far more than merely obliterating an island.

This is the 70th Anniversary of the first Godzilla movie, and we should all look this good at that age. In fact, when I heard scuttlebutt that Godzilla Minus One was quite good, it went on my short-list of movies that had to be seen. Not only did it not disappoint, it is surprising how good and accomplished it is, how mature, and downright clever. It is a master-stroke that combines the kaiju tradition of Japanese monster movies with the sensibilities of the early Akiro Kurosawa post-war films filled with defeatist angst and finding the hope and courage to rise above it.

How do they do it? It's something they should have done from the beginning—move the super-imposed people at the bottom of the screen fleeing Godzilla's toes and moving them center-screen. Rather than the scientific and military perfunctories that usually do the exposition in the films, Godzilla Minus One takes to the victims of the attacks, makes their struggles real and relatable, and then "mess" with them until the audience can't take it anymore. In Godzilla Minus One, the government—such as it is—is absent, more concerned with not spreading a panic than saving lives ("Information control is Japan's specialty" says one of the heroes), and the U.S., concerned with arming the Japanese so soon after the war, and with Russia monitoring their actions in the Pacific, take no action at all. Except we send some decommissioned war-ships (we're good at that).

It's up to an already-beaten-down populace to come to the fore and save themselves from a force that—like the rest of the world—just...doesn't...care. At the same time, writer-director (and SFX supervisor) Takashi Yamazaki removes the traditional sentimentality associated with this series of films and strips it from its titular monster, making it completely unfathomable and that much scarier, the stakes that much higher, and the tension that much more sphincter-tightening. Plus, his focus on the human scale of things makes the craning looks at the monster that much more impressive.

I don't "do" Top Ten lists—I find them limiting—but, if you'd tell me that a Godzilla movie would make it on my list of the top ten films of the year, I'd have laughed. I'm not laughing. I'm still kinda jazzed at how unequivocally good Godzilla Minus One is.

In fact, if you have any prejudices about going to see a "Godzilla" movie, get over them. Don't hesitate. Go. Go and enjoy. You'll be impressed.

 

Drive My Car

Schrödinger's Guilt; Chekhov's Gun

or

Uncle Vanya on Ground Zero

 

I've seen so many movies recently about multi-verses and meta-verses (and there's a google-verse coming to your "superposition-plex" including Dr. Strange in The Multiverse of Madness, The Flash: Flashpoint, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse—Part One* and Everything Everywhere All at Once) you'd think it was a new concept rather than originating in Ancient Greece by the philosopher Chrysippus**—at least in THIS dimension, anyway.

 

With all those multi-plex movies about multi-verses, it's going to crowd out worthy little films that don't have people in spandex in them. Movies like the one out of Japan, Drive My Car—or Doraibu mai kâ, or ドライブ・マイ・カー, which will probably win all sorts of awards this season, and is, in its normal, every-day way, about how our own lives can be meta-verses, without a single anomaly in the space-time continuum. Or any sort of involvement with Mark Zuckerberg.

 

All good things.

Oto Kafuku (Reika Kirishima) wakes up one night and, in the pre-dawn light, tells her drowsing husband Yûsuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima) a vivid story about a girl obsessed with a boy, who, noticing that no one is there during the day, sneaks into the boy's family's house—just to be there and to be a part of his world. She keeps doing it, every time taking some common object—like a pencil, a paper-clip, and leaving something of her own hidden in a drawer as a token of her visit. "They are gradually mingling in their exchange of tokens," she says. Her descriptions are vivid, based on feelings and sensations. His comments are practical, finding faults or attitudes that are weak in the story.

It turns out he's an actor. An actor and director, who specializes in multi-lingual presentations—the actors speaking in their native languages. She's a former actor, now a writer, developing a series. The two collaborate incessantly—he is her sounding board for ideas (which come to her in a unique manner) and she helps him learn parts by recording responses on a cassette which he plays to while he's driving to appointments. One of those appointments is to play Uncle Vanya in a Russian production of Chekhov's play he's directing. The day he's to leave, he's alerted that it's canceled due to weather, and he decides to go home. When he arrives, he finds Oto having sex with a young actor working on her series. Yûsuke, having not been seen by them, chooses not to confront them, but backs out of his apartment and gets a hotel.

He calls later, pretending that he's in Russia—never mentioning to his wife what he'd seen—and a week later, drives to the airport to the engagement. But, he's hit broadside by another driver and taken to the hospital. Oto rushes to his side. It seems Yûsuke has glaucoma and is losing his vision. It can't be cured, but it can be slowed with eye-drops, which he dutifully takes. The car gets repaired. No questions are asked. And if Yûsuke has to go somewhere, Oto drives him. He plays Vanya, but the lines about fidelity are crushing to him and one night, he almost cannot finish the play. When he gets home, things are as normal, but as he leaves for work one day, Oto says "Tonight, can we talk?" But, he takes his time going home and when he enters their apartment, Oto is dead on the floor, of a cerebral hemorrhage.

There is still a part of this prelude to tell, but the credits haven't even happened yet—they show up at the 40 minute mark—and it's not even the main part of the nearly 3 hour movie. Yûsuke will be invited to Hiroshima to direct another production of "Vanya" but, for insurance purposes, he will not be allowed to drive. Against his preferences, he is assigned a rather stoic driver (Tôko Miura) who we will learn has also suffered a loss and the two must hesitantly navigate the terrains of grief they share.

That's the majority of the film. But that preamble sets up the level of detail and the sense that this is less about plot than it is about the layers of life. This is a dense, detailed film of which things are said and left unsaid, where the mysteries one contemplates are what somebody meant by the way they said something, the way one feels being more important than the intention, and the way the mind slips into "What if?" mode for no other reason than to torture oneself. It's as much of the mind as it is a display of interactions between people, reading between the lines of the script and becoming more like a book narrative. It also explores the trenches of survivor's guilt and the unseen country of what might have been, depending for much time on the evolution of Yûsuke's production of Chekhov and finding in it no answers, but it's own degree of dealing.

 

It's really a wonderful film, with the same intricacy of thought that I've found in some Japanese writing. That it transfers so well to the screen shouldn't surprise in its modest but intimate themes. And its going over the ground of the mind's different interpretations of truth, makes it a bit of a mystery film, even though there's no "who done it" involved, only the question of "why."

 

Be mindful of that three hours, though.

 

   

* Yeesh. I'm looking forward to it and all, but they should have got an editor just for the TITLE!!

 

** Or comics writer Gardner Fox—I always get the two confused.