Rhapsody in August

A good movie is interesting and easy to understand. This is an absolute treasure of a film. A love letter to Nagasaki. An opportunity to see how deeply the atom bomb affected Japanese culture. An opportunity to see a number of the landmarks of the attack. And edited so wonderfully. Kurosawa always highly prized being able to tell the the story in images alone and understood how composition of shots increases content, and this movie has some very quiet sober shots that hit really really hard. It shows how we can fail to see things that are right under our noses for years and years. How things can happen that you never get over. I loved this movie!!!

A beautiful, beautiful film. If you only know Kurosawa through Seven Samurai then this will come as something of a shock. Gentle, sensitive, moving and uplifting. The cinematography is sumptuous with plenty of touches that let you know that this is no ordinary film maker. By far the best of his later films in my opinion.

Don't be confused by the 'starring Richard Gere' tag. He only has a minor part, though he takes it well.

Just go and see it!

A beautiful and deeply moving work,it deals with a taboo subject which is rarely treated on the screen.The approach is much different from that of Alain Resnais in "Hiroshima mon amour",and the main reason is that the director is Japanese.Far from Marguerite Duras' verbal logorrhea,Kurosawa lets us in the tragedy through children's eyes,and their simple and naive words.These children,who visit the memorial, only know what the history books tell:almost nothing.

One of the movie's main subject is building some kind of bridge between two generations(a bridge over troubled water,because the adults are rather unsympathetic characters).Kurosawa's granny is universal,she 's the embodiment of suffering,forgiveness and wisdom."Blame it on the war" she keeps on repeating during the whole movie.And her hard-earned peace of mind ,she tries to communicate it to her four grandsons.She does want to see his brother ,now dying,who emigrated to Hawai and made his fortune in pineapples, a long time ago,and his family.The children's fathers are mean little bourgeois,only interested in these American relatives' dough and luxury mansion with pools,the mothers hateful silly geese.None of them can understand the grandmother any more.

So if there's some hope to be found,it can only lie in the relationship old/young,skipping a whole generation,with the exception of minor Richard Gere character.The four children and their granny sitting under a blue moonlight when the adults are talking social promotion and money is beautifully filmed.But it will not delude for long.The last pictures are a real metaphor:sure the road to follow for the youngsters is the grandmother's one,which does not forget the past ,but it's a rocky road,edged with chasms .

Akira Kurosawa is one of my very favorite filmmakers. If you search through my reviews, I have written about a few, The Seven Samurai, High and Low, Kagemusha, and Dreams. I have seen many more, Rashomon, Ikiru (my personal favorite), Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Dersu Uzala, and Ran. I have only disliked one, High and Low, but not one of his films failed to amaze me in some way or other. My initial opinion, after seeing Rashomon, The Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Ran and Kagemusha was that he was an amazing stylist whose films felt slightly impersonal to me. I strongly disagree with that opinion now (I expressed it in my review to Kagemusha, which I'm surprised hasn't resulted in tons of hate mail).

I have just finished watching Kurosawa's second to last film, Rhapsody in August. It is not highly regarded, usually dismissed as a very minor work in a master's portfolio. This I also discovered about my second favorite of his films, Dreams. Well, as far as my opinion, I think people were dead wrong about both of these films.

Rhapsody in August is not a stylistic masterpiece like The Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, or Ran. Instead, only second to Ikiru, it is Kurosawa's most humanistic film. I have only seen one film by him (although I've read a lot about him), but I would compare it more to Yasujiro Ozu's work.

This film has a plethora of themes, ranging from the effect of the H-Bomb on both the Japanese and the Americans, the generation gaps between the three generations present (the matriarch of the family feels separate from her middle-aged children, but she relates well to her grandchildren who are interested in their country's sorrowful history), and the effect of American culture on the Japanese of the present generation. It is quite a handful, but everything is handled so subtly that some viewers who don't pick up on it all may easily grow uninterested. In some ways, the film feels very didactic (in a good way). I can imagine this film being showed to younger children, since the four grandchildren, at least at the beginning, are learning about the history of the bomb and Nagazaki and their grandfather's death.

The only weak point of the film is probably the very end, which is difficult to understand. I have a feeling that there was some cross-cultural barrier preventing my understanding of it, so if anyone does get it, please contact me. Anyway, as I perceived it, the film ended kind of randomly. But still, what has come before is too good to get too upset by the lack of closure. It deserves a 10/10.

Although aware of Akira Kurosawa's standing in the realm of world cinema,I have never been a great fanatic of his films as most of them are Samurai films heavily laden with symbolic references to Japanese society.For me Akira Kurosawa's non Samurai films are better films as they speak of deeper issues like human sentiments.I watched "Rhapsody in August" directed by Akira Kurosawa film with rapt attention.As I was watching it after having watched "Madadayo",I could not help but comparing it both in style as well as content with that film.Both the films were made by Kurosawa when he was at the end of his career and may be for this reason he chose to make humanist stories.Rhapsody in August is a meaningful tale for all people whether they are young or old,American or Japanese.It is a film which shows how important a family is and how wisdom must be passed from the old to the young. Kurosawa has deftly tackled the question of Japan's Atomic bomb tragedy through plain words spoken by an old lady who tells her young grandchildren that with the passage of time all wounds are healed.Rhapsody in August tells us albeit in a non academic manner why it is important to live peacefully thereby avoiding war for the benefit of peaceful coexistence and human society.