|
Akira Kurosawa is well aware of Honda's Godzilla, his own monster is brought down to human size and contemplated through the filter of civil court. The elderly patriarch (Toshiro Mifune) has never learned to stop worrying and love the bomb: "Delusional fears" consume his decisions and threaten to bankrupt the family, the plan is to exchange the foundry in Japan ("a sort of valley that all radioactivity flows into") for a farm in Brazil. His relatives file a petition to declare him mentally incompetent, though his insanity is really the "super sanity" Jean Dubuffet alluded to. "Everybody has to die, but I won't be murdered!" The continuation of Ikiru has Takashi Shimura as mediator while Mifune in old-age makeup à la Ford embodies fury. His impersonation of a dread-wrecked septuagenarian is quite the hunk of Kabuki cantankerousness—cowering from imaginary blasts, twisting from under a powdered crew-cut and wielding a fan like a blade, he lays out the Lear he might have given Kurosawa in Ran. (The businessman's brood, including illegitimate children from several mistresses, are by turns mortified, ungrateful, and avaricious.) The theme is flatly stated ("Are we, who can remain unperturbed in an insane world, the crazy ones?"), though the most interesting effects lie in the Ozuesque comedy of familial unease, in the way a protracted static shot of the protagonist debasing himself before his clan becomes as distressing as a mushroom cloud. The son-in-law's taunting description of nuclear wreckage is visualized by Imamura in Black Rain, the burning orb seen from the asylum window could be Major Amberson's monologue from another angle. "Pops, if you're so afraid, why not move to another planet?" Human hope rattles in the geometric hall of the closing shot. With Minoru Chiaki, Eiko Miyoshi, Kyoko Aoyama, Haruko Togo, Noriko Sengoku, Eijiro Tono, and Ken Mitsuda. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |