AK 201: Kurosawa to the Rescue

[Kurosawa seres]

Film Forum

Through Feb. 18

THE BAD SLEEP WELL (1960) In this extraordinary movie (showing at Film Forum Jan. 26), Kurosawa critiques corporate culture with an epic that Coppola’s The Godfather, although inspired by Kurosawa’s film, cannot match. Its revival takes down The Godfather, showing how exact, powerful and original a Kurosawa concept can be. This revenge drama tackles a corporation and public utility, tracing its chain of command to a family’s hierarchy. The Bad Sleep Well is an audacious formal experiment in theatricality and classicism (borrowing Noh staging and a Greek chorus) but with a sly, modernist use of irony ("Life is ironic," Toshiro Mifune as corporate climber Nishi tells his wife Yoshiko). We understand the present through traditional, yet updated, moral codes. Western musical motifs in the opening wedding sequence create comical adjustments and commentary on the industrialism that changes Japanese culture, contaminating while modernizing it. Kurosawa uses the format of grand tragedy to account for the enormous deceit he observes. In the shocking bridal procession, the crippled virgin’s appearance signifies her caste—female subordination and affliction. This is more adroit than Coppola’s co-opted females. By using the gangster genre, Coppola was one remove from his subject. He lost his focus and wound up romanticizing the corruption he intended to denounce. This was the result of misguided movie-brat modernism, where genre homage overwhelmed personal, artistic expression. The Corleone siblings (coming 12 years after The Bad Sleep Well) represented a popular adjustment to corruption; using the crime genre as a metaphor in a way acquiesced to the situation—thus altering the course of American cinema for the next 40 years. But Kurosawa uses Jacobean, Shakespearean processes (slightly revamping Hamlet) to better indict contemporary materialism and corruption. Kurosawa never gives in to the narrative sensations of an action form and cinema regains its moral compass. Aki Kaurismaki’s 1992 Hamlet Goes Business explicitly copied the same approach (Hamlet template and b&w) but as corporate satire. Kurosawa’s revenge scenes are staged to be unfunny--stunning visualizations of stark, outre violence. Throughout, Kurosawa’s taste for the epic gives this wide-screen film grandeur that neither romantic-pessimist Coppola nor a tabloid moralist like Sam Fuller could ever achieve. It is both extremely rigorous and dynamic. With Kurosawa’s CinemaScope proscenium compositions, intimate conversations seen through distance (like Nishi and Yoshiko in the ruins of a munitions factory), actually draw one in toward emotional closeness. Speeches, ritual gestures and genre codes are assembled operatically by Kurosawa for modernist comprehension—similar to the Shakespearean undertone of Welles’ Touch of Evil. But Kurosawa brings those undertones to his formally innovative surface. The tableau of Nishi and friends coming out of the munitions factory to reminisce about emerging from a bomb shelter, captures the post-war miasma template and b&w) but as corporate satire. Kurosawa’s revenge scenes are staged to be unfunny--stunning visualizations of stark, outre violence. Throughout, Kurosawa’s taste for the epic gives this wide-screen film grandeur that neither romantic-pessimist Coppola nor a tabloid moralist like Sam Fuller could ever achieve. It is both extremely rigorous and dynamic. The Bad Sleep Well looks forward to the profundity in Altman’s 1992 light satire The Player (where the bad sleep well idea—lost conscience—applies to Hollywood). Kurosawa’s more complex moral and narrative structure makes the Hollywood "perfection" of The first Godfather film seem like kidstuff. Coppola only properly saluted Kurosawa in The Godfather III where he adapted the opera Cavalleria Rusticana to frame his characters in a richer cultural context that is yet to be fully appreciated. The Bad Sleep Well’s ground-breaking concept shows Kurosawa’s uncompromised ambition. It is so unusual—contemplating both rustic chivalry and troubled conscience--that it deserves that rare appellation "some kind of great film." DRUNKEN ANGEL (1948) Proving an interest in daily living, Drunken Angel ( showing Jan. 23) teams an irascible a doctor (Shimura) with a young, tubercular gangster (Mifune). Unlike Kurosawa’s period, Samurai films, this post-WWII story has a socially conscious sobriety; it anticipates Ikiru’s mortality tale when Mifune defiantly asserts "I’m not afraid to die. I’ll die anyway." As both men, despairing alcoholics, recover moral purpose, Kurosawa confronts their mortality. They embody Japan’s future, symbolized by inhabiting a polluted city where western influences pervade, especially in music and nightclub boogie-woogie dance. The rebellious yakuza parallels the rebellious doctor—both drunken angels, flawed men whose weakness are outlined by the pressure to live, control their destinies and survive. Kurosawa’s plot recalls John Ford’s 1932 Doctor Bull but with a blatant social commentary. Drunken Angel puts today’s overweening, confused social dramas like Gomorrah and Il Divo in proper perspective. Its view of the yakuza ("They will always do the wrong thing in the end") even suggests how The Sopranos got it wrong. Kurosawa’s films survive as a rudder for wayward pop culture. There’s too much obvious symbolism in Drunken Angel but at least Kurosawa knows how richly symbols communicate. He was one of the greatest visual intelligences in movie history. The two quick cuts when Mifune pulls a switchblade then stalks his enemy in a tripled mirror reflection puts contemporary action directors to shame. And the final ambivalent comments on a man’s life—balancing remorse and grief—are surely source for the moral divide ending Do the Right Thing—but without contradiction or confusion.

IKIRU (1952) Sometimes regarded as Kurosawa’s finest film, Ikiru (showing Jan. 20), its simple, one-protagonist story of an elderly man facing death contradicts his renown as a director of energetic action epics. Sometimes it is the most profound movie I’ve ever seen about people’s hidden motivations and surely the greatest ever indictment of government bureaucracy, rooted in a study of people’s lack of self-knowledge. No two shots are alike (an influence on DePalma). The densely layered, shadowed visual style recalls Sternberg and has much in common with his splendid The Salvation Hunters and Sternberg’s theme of salvation surviving the contexts of erotic and political decadence. Ikiru is one of the cornerstones of modern civilization.