1980 Week: Kagemusha

          Thematically fascinating and visually glorious, this Akira Kurosawa epic about political intrigue in feudal Japan has several passages that are intoxicating. Moreover, the story delivers timeless themes by way of characters that feel mythic, which has the effect of making the film seem like a slick retelling of a fable that’s been handed down through generations. Yet Kagemusha is not perfect. Parts of the movie are maddeningly sluggish, and the lead character’s personality is presented so cryptically that it’s hard to buy into some of the choices he makes. For viewers who accept that Kagemusha operates on a largely metaphorical level, however, the picture is a feast for the mind and senses.

          Exploring profound topics of honesty, identity, and loyalty, the film tracks one man’s unlikely ascent from dishonor to a peculiar kind of heroism. Set in the 16th century, the story begins by introducing Lord Shingen Takeda (Tatsuya Nakadai), leader of the powerful Takeda clan. Shingen’s pragmatic brother, Nobukado (Tsutomo Yamazaki), presents a thief (also played by Nakadai) whom he recently saved from execution, noting the thief’s resemblance to Shingen. Despite the thief’s obvious low character, Shingen agrees to use the thief as a kagemusha, or decoy, should the need arise. Soon afterward, Shingen suffers a mortal wound while visiting a combat zone, and before he dies, he demands that his family hide the news about his death for three years, giving the clan time to consolidate power and groom a successor. The thief assumes the role of Lord Shingen, but not without difficulty. Beyond the expected problems of failing to convince the people who knew Lord Shingen best, there’s the issue of enemy spies who saw part of the ritual during which Lord Shingen’s body was put to rest. Eventually, the thief enjoys both failure and triumph while portraying the deceased warlord, and the dramatic question becomes whether the clan can survive without the strength and wisdom of the real Shingen.

          While there’s nothing new about the doppelgänger plot device, Kurosawa pursues goals much loftier than the simple rendering of a premise. For instance, the film approaches spirituality with its depiction of the thief internalizing the reverence he sees directed toward Shingen even after the warlord’s death; living up to the role becomes a form of personal transcendence. Similarly, Kurosawa presents battlefield scenes as cinematic poetry—armies wearing color-coded flags, lines of horsemen silhouetted against blood-red skies, combat zones strewn with corpses. Throughout the movie, Kurosawa provides a master class in composition, whether he’s using symmetrical rows of people or more ephemeral elements, such as mist and smoke, to construct indelible images.

          The director also employs visions of pomp and ritual to ground his film in its historical period. One striking vignette involves laborers using brooms to erase hoof prints in a courtyard so a warlord’s dramatic entrance occurs on unmolested soil. All of this is set to a regal orchestral score, which lends Shakespearan grandeur. If there’s a significant complaint to be lodged against Kagenmusha, it’s that the film represents the stately side of Kurosawa’s artistry rather than the kinetic side. The dynamic filmmaker of the ’50s and ’60s emerges periodically during action scenes, but Kurosawa relies quite heavily on static frames, which—along with lengthy dramatic pauses—contribute to overly reverential pacing.

Kagemusha: GROOVY

Dodes’ka-den (1970)

          Akira Kurosawa’s dreamlike ensemble piece Dodes’ka-den is akin to an abstract painting, in that different viewers will interpret the piece in different ways. Rather than delivering one overarching storyline, as was the norm in most of Kurosawa’s films prior to and following this one, Dodes-ka’den uses a single location to connect various subplots and vignettes. Although most of the individual narrative elements are coherent and linear, the cumulative effect of Dodes’ka-den is largely experiential. However, because the film is so long, running nearly two and a half hours, and because the pacing is so meditative, not everyone will have the patience to accompany Kurosawa for the whole journey. Furthermore, the episodic storytelling style creates an inevitable problem: Some threads in this tapestry are more interesting than others, which means that whole stretches of the picture feel like needless intrusions. That said, small rewards await those who accept this film on its offbeat terms, and it’s possible to simply revel in Kurosawa’s compassion and creativity without trying to grasp the big picture that he paints with Dodes’ka-den.

          The setting is a massive trash heap, where dozens of people have created a shantytown rife with the same sorts of gossip and interconnected relationships and melodrama found in any other human community. Given the setting, obviously all of the characters face horrific challenges. Beyond the shared hardship of poverty, some citizens suffer from mental and physical illness, while others endure alcoholism. In one of the film’s typically poetic flourishes, Kurosawa introduces viewers to the world of the trash heap by showing the resident who seems most content with his life. He’s a mentally challenged young man who believes that he has a job operating a train, so every day, he wakes up and climbs into his imaginary trolley, then pantomimes driving the vehicle throughout the trash heap while making sound effects with his voice. (The film’s title stems from the noise he makes when imitating the chugging of a train engine.) Since this young man lives inside the special world of his imagination, he’s insulated from the suffering that surrounds him.

          An older man, who used to be a business executive but tragically lost his family, pleads with the trash heap’s resident doctor for poison with which to kill himself. A sensitive young woman tries to break through the emotional barriers of a mystery man so disconnected from everyone else that he seems like a zombie. An imaginative father regales his young son with stories about the great house he’s going to build for them, even as they both succumb to disease. And so on.

          Kurosawa weaves together the lives of more than a dozen characters, sometimes using minimalistic techniques (conveying relationships through facial expressions and physical proximity), and sometimes using copious amounts of verbiage. Even the notion of what’s meant to be real and what’s meant to be metaphorically representative is fluid. In the father/son storyline, for instance, Kurosawa uses stylized makeup and painted backdrops to create surreal effects, whereas most of the film is realistic. Toro Takemitsu’s musical score is similarly eclectic, ranging from cutesy and sentimental to ethereal and evocative.

          There is, in fact, a great sense of experimentation flowing through Dodes’ka-den, Kurosawa’s first film in color. Certain scenes rely so heavily on shadows that they would have been just as effective in black and white, but the boldest stuff—notably the father/son scenes—anticipates the masterful use of color that distinguished Kurosawa’s films of the ’80s and ’90s. Dodes’ka-den is more uneven than frustrating, for while the picture often feels rudderless, much of what it contains is intimate and touching. There’s also something eerie about watching the suicide storyline, since Kurosawa attempted to take his own life following the commercial failure of this picture. For all its peculiarities, Dodes’ka-den comes across as a deeply personal expression by one of the cinema’s true giants.

Dodes’ka-den: FUNKY

Dersu Uzala (1975)

          The revered Japanese director Akira Kurosawa only made one feature film in a language other than his native tongue, and it was this poetic character study about the impact a soulful primitive has on a man from the civilized world. Painted on a broad canvas comprising myriad widescreen vistas of the natural world and unspooling at epic length (144 minutes), Dersu Uzala takes place mostly in the wilderness of Russia’s section of the Far East. Spoken entirely in Russian, the movie begins in 1910, when government surveyor Arsenev (Yurly Solomin) travels to Siberia upon hearing that his old friend, frontier guide Dersu (Maksim Munzuk), has died. Revisiting the place where they met, Arsenev remembers his long acquaintance with Dersu, triggering the lengthy flashbacks that provide most of the picture’s running time.

          The movie’s central relationship begins in 1902, when Arsenev first travels to Siberia, tasked with mapping the area for the Russian government. Aresnev eventually stumbles across Dersu, a Nanai mountain man who travels alone because he lost his family during an outbreak of smallpox. Expert at survival and reverential toward the natural world, Dersu escorts Arsenev’s survey team through remote terrain and quickly evolves from an object of ridicule (Arsenev’s people initially mock Dersu’s superstitious beliefs) to a valued colleague. In the film’s most riveting scene, Aresenev and Dersu find themselves lost and alone on a frozen field just before nightfall, so Dersu leads his friend in a desperate endeavor to gather stalks of tall grass with which to build a makeshift shelter, thereby saving both of them from certain death overnight. Although Kurosawa’a visual style throughout much of Dersu Uzala is frustratingly static, with lugubriously long takes of people talking, the great artist’s consummate skill emerges when he uses quick-cut angles of two men fighting for their lives amid the golden hues of twilight.

          Based upon a nonfiction book by the real-life Vladimir Arsenev, Dersu Uzala gains potency in its second half, when Arsenev returns to Siberia for a subsequent mission and discovers that Dersu’s failing eyesight has eliminated his value as a guide and endangered his ability to survive in his beloved wilderness. This plot development motivates another standout sequence, during which Dersu reacts with terror after he shoots at but misses a tiger that’s bedeviling Arsenev’s men; in Dersu’s superstitious mind, the spirit of the tiger will hunt him down because Dersu has failed to fulfill his role in the natural order of things. Arsenev nobly brings his friend home to the city, but Dersu is too much a creature of the frontier to blend into the modern world. During the passages depicting Dersu’s decline, Kurosawa laces the film with lyrical narration about loss that sums up not only the key themes of Dersu Uzala, but also metaphysical tropes that ran through myriad Kurosawa masterpieces, from Ikiru (1952) to Ran (1985).

          Although Dersu Uzala won considerable acclaim, including an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, it might be a stretch to call the picture one of the essential works in Kurosawa’s towering filmography. It’s a soulful film, but also an unwieldy one that would have benefited from judicious editing. Nonetheless, it represented a creative rebirth after a dark time in the filmmaker’s life (Kurosawa attempted suicide in the early ’70s), and he would soon return to the samurai milieu of his ’50s and ’60s classics with the poetic Kagemusha (1980).

Dersu Uzala: GROOVY

Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970)

          Representing a great opportunity for historical spectacle that was sacrificed on the altar of its own leviathan scope, Tora! Tora! Tora! was conceived by Twentieth Century-Fox chief Daryl F. Zanuck as a companion piece to his epic war movie The Longest Day (1962). Whereas the earlier film was a star-studded reenactment of the D-Day invasion, focusing primarily on the heroism of a successful Allied assault, Tora! Tora! Tora! paints across a bigger canvas. The picture follows both American and Japanese forces before, during, and after the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941. Zanuck’s intentions were basically honorable, since he put together a coproduction with a Japanese team that was responsible for portraying their country’s soldiers in a humane light; Zanuck even hired the great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa to develop and direct the Japanese half of the picture, although Kurosawa was replaced once production got underway. Journeyman Richard Fleischer, an efficient traffic cop not known for his artistry, handled the English-language scenes.

          Yet Zanuck’s overreaching vision of an opulent super-production almost inevitably generated a bloated movie in which hardware overwhelms humanity. The leaden screenplay, credited to Larry Forrester and Kurosawa allies Ryuzo Kikushima and Hideo Oguni—and based on two different books—is a dull recitation of names and dates without any memorable characterizations. In the American scenes alone, venerable actors including Martin Balsam, Joseph Cotten, E.G. Marshall, Jason Robards, and James Whitmore get lost amid the generic hordes of men in military uniforms wandering through command centers and battleship bridges. In the admirable effort to explain how and why the Japanese military caught American forces unaware, the movie provides dry description when it should provide intense drama—paradoxically, trying to do too much led the filmmakers to do too little.

          Nonetheless, the movie gets exciting whenever it departs from its inept attempts at personal interplay and focuses on battlefield spectacle. Employing a huge assortment of boats and planes (plus a whole lot of pyro, of course), Fleischer stages lavish scenes of wartime destruction, all of which are jacked up by composer Jerry Goldsmith’s invigorating music. Thus, it’s no surprise that the lasting legacy of Tora! Tora! Tora! is as a stockpile of endlessly reused footage—according to Wikipedia, clips and outtakes from this film appear in Midway (1976), The Final Countdown (1980), several TV episodes and miniseries, and even Pearl Harbor (2001). So, if you’re a military-history buff, you’ll probably find a lot to enjoy in Tora! Tora! Tora!–otherwise, you might have a hard time trudging through the movie’s 144 impressive but inert minutes.

Tora! Tora! Tora!: FUNKY