arsalankazemian

I watched the Criterion Collection two-disc set of The Irishman. The second disc, with lots of commentaries and detailed analysis, gave valuable insight into the world of Scorsese.

The movie revisits some of Scorsese's old favourite themes of loyalty, friendship and betrayal but compared to his previous Italian mafia films, it has a more quiet contemplative pace, especially main character Frank Sheeran (played by Robert Deniro) who revisits his gangster life with the hindsight of old age and its losses and regrets, leaving him alone and resigned in a nursing home.

The film brought together giants like Deniro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci and Harvey Keitel who are all -- except Pacino -- longtime collaborators with Scorsese. The "de-aging" technique used to allow same actors playing their own role over a few decades was not very convincing but the story felt more coherent in this way.

This movie is based on the real kidnapping of a young boy by the Mafia after his father becomes an informant of the police. It mainly follows the character of Giuseppe, who has been kidnapped, and his friend and lover Luna. The first half of the film felt very slow-based and you cannot be sure what direction the movie is taking. But the filmmakers tied the story really well in the second half.

I really liked how they used natural elements, light and darkness, and animals as well as dreams and nightmares to show the ordeal and sufferings of the two young main characters, Luna and Giuseppe, in a world of ignorance and indifference of the adults.

The movie is not an ordinary ghost story type, as the title might suggest, but uses a real Mafia-related event as its basis which is told in a unique way through the eyes of its young characters against the haunting yet beautiful Sicilian landscape.

"Rhapsody in August" (1991) is Akira Kurosawa's next to last film. It belongs to Kurosawa's final period of film-making when he moved away from themes such as samurai stories and historic eras of Japan and focused on issues such as the Second World War and its effect on the lives of ordinary people in Japan. The title of this film is a reference to August 9, 1945, when the atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki.

"Rhapsody in August" tells the story of four young girls and boys who visit their grandmother in a village near Nagasaki for their summer vacation. She is one of the survivors of the atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki during the war but she lost her husband in the atomic bomb attack. It is through her that her grandchildren learn about the atomic bomb attack and how it killed their grandfather. The children's parents have gone to Hawaii to visit the grandmother's elder brother, who had married an American woman and lived there since then.

The film shows how the children's indifference and disrespect for their grandmother gradually turns into understanding and respect for the sufferings she has gone through. We are allowed to explore the Nagasaki catastrophe through the grandmother's point of view and its aftermath through the children's view, who come to show much more understanding for the catastrophic event than their parents, who only seem to care about not raising the issue of the atomic bomb on fear that it might upset their American relatives and deprive them from their enterprise.

Although the film, in several occasions, makes direct criticism against the US over the Nagasaki atomic bomb attack, it is mostly through the grandmother's powerful and vivid recollections of the war, and the children's understanding of the events, that the depth of people's sufferings and the cruelty of the act -- the atomic bomb attack -- are seen. One great example is when the grandmother compares the mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb to a great eye watching over the city.

The grandmother is the living soul of all the pains caused by the atomic bomb and Kurosawa, all through the film and particularly in its iconic ending, well reminds us that time might not heal all wounds.