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The tangle of history, the burden of survival. Rashomon and Fires on the Plain are the poles, the inquirer is the war widow (Sachiko Hidari) still without an answer two and a half decades after the surrender. Her only goal is being able to offer chrysanthemums in honor of her sergeant husband (Tetsuro Tamba), whose demise is muddled by unreliable records and divergent recollections, "not a very pleasant tale." The gallant charger remembered by the pig farmer (Noboru Mitani) becomes the craven potato-thief suggested by the Kabuki clown (Isao Natsuyagi), their respective realms of shantytown and burlesque house are but two of Tokyo's shadow zones. Mutiny and mysterious flesh fill the memory of the blind cuckold (Shinjiro Ebara), meanwhile the haunted professor (Taketoshi Naito) tries to teach poetry underneath roaring airplanes. ("A precious sacrifice that was essential," he tells himself, before asking, "Is that what we fought for?") For a jagged picture of Japan's lingering trauma, nothing beats Kinji Fukasaku's clarity and fury: Feverish zooms and hand-held swivels against archival snapshots and freeze-frames, black-and-white that shifts to color for abrupt blood spurts. A raw sense of outrage in the New Guinea jungle, the excruciation of a botched beheading, Wilde in Beach Red has the view from the other side. "No winning in dying," only starvation and disease and cannibalism swept under the official story. (A bullet blasts through a family photo as the screen turns crimson to register a ghastly revelation, a signature Fukasaku eruption.) The heroine carries the searching torch yet tragedy weighs just as heavily on Mitani's discarded slum rat, nostalgic for pulverized rubble and marked by horrific adjustments: "I ate a man... and the world didn't change." Accusatory howl and sober gaze comprise the coda, and ten years later there's Costa-Gavras' Missing. With Sanae Nakahara, Yumiko Fujita, and Kanemon Nakamura.
--- Fernando F. Croce |