Wisely marketed by Netflix as "Akira Kurosawa's Dreams," this is my first anthology viewing since...well, another Kurosawa piece. It's also from later in his career than anything else I've seen. I figured I'd like it better than Dodes'ka-den, partly because dreams are bound to be at least close to fantasy.
There are eight stories, generally set in 20th-century Japan. In "Sunshine Through the Rain," a young boy ignores his mother's warning not to go into the woods on a day with the titular weather, because kitsune have weddings then and don't brook human witnesses. In "The Peach Orchard," another boy, missing the peach trees that his family clearcut, sees their strangely human-shaped spirits. In "The Blizzard," four mountain climbers are on the verge of succumbing, possibly to the yuki-onna, before reaching their camp. In "The Tunnel," a former WWII commander walks through a tunnel and meets the ghosts of men who died following his orders and don't know it yet. In "Crows," a budding artist imagines(?) himself meeting an anglophone Vincent van Gogh (Martin Scorsese!) in France and traversing the scenes of several paintings. In "Mount Fuji in Red," a nuclear meltdown rapidly depopulates the volcanic area, with most people deciding they'd rather drown than face cancer. In "The Weeping Demon," on another mountain, radioactivity has effectively turned humans into demons in a Buddhist hell. And in "Village of the Waterfalls," a traveler discovers a contented Luddite village.
If there is an overarching theme to these tales, it's the environment in relation to humans, but I might not have noticed without the Netflix summary. TT certainly doesn't call attention to anything in nature, and TB doesn't seem to be making a statement about it. I will grant that the cinematography makes the most use of the environment this side of Ran, even if I for one was more captivated by the van Gogh approximations, which look like the only budget strain, care of Industrial Light & Magic.
No, the one thing they all have in common is a reported basis in Kurosawa's actual dreams, with no second writer. You have to be either very well established or very arrogant to make a whole movie out of those. Even creative folk have only so many dreams that actually lend themselves to the screen.
Most viewers have found the results amenable, but I couldn't help thinking they needed a little something extra, a revision of the subconscious first draft. STtR, for example, has no closure and thus feels philosophically pointless. I might have reordered the set, too: The last four mostly feature an inquisitive man getting an oral lesson, and the similar stories could have been broken up more. (I was going to say the drearier ones, but honestly, positivity is in short supply here.)
Perhaps what frustrates me most is the pace. At just under two hours in total, the plots average less than 15 minutes each, but they all have about two minutes' worth of plot. You have to exercise that Noh patience. I realize that actual dreams tend to progress slowly, but they never feel slow to me in retrospect. Glad the makers cut plans for three more segments.
Now I've seen 20 Kurosawa movies -- nearly two-thirds of them -- and the ones I haven't are all near the beginning or end of his career. This is hardly among my faves, but it might suffice for a finale. It is intensely personal and captures a few key strengths of the auteur.
No comments:
Post a Comment