Criterion Eclipse Series 7: Postwar Kurosawa

I've taken quite a shine to Criterion's Eclipse line series of reasonably priced (for Criterion) DVD sets highlighting a specific era of a noted or overshadowed director's work. Series 3: Late Ozu goes down like pure cinematic opiate, and Series 5: The First Films of Sam Fuller is nothing short of required viewing. One of the more recent volumes takes a look at 5 films Kurosawa made over a roughly ten year period follow Japan's WWII defeat. Its an interesting crop of films, made all the more interesting because they're not all that successful. Its also worth taking into account that the best Kurosawa films of that period have already been released in proper Criterion DVD editions. Still, the Eclipse series is a very watchable portrait of a young director just starting to hit his stride.

No Regrets For Our Youth
1946
Fans of Yasujiro Ozu will be shocked to see his perennial star Setsuko Hara, leave behind her crisp kimono and prim shyness for dirty peasant rags and manual rice paddy labor. Centering on bourgeoisie Hara's journey from activist, to the wife of a radical, to filial daughter-in-law, to a champion of rural labor, the film is splintered in focus and poorly paced, missing the mark until its satisfying third act. Hindsight being 20/20 it looks a little disingenuous of Kurosawa to make a film celebrating student protests in the face of imperial Japan's rising fascism considering he was complicit in the war effort. The film instead provides a too-late apology from a defeated and occupied country. I'm curious as to how the film's final message, which has all the gooey sweetness of communist propaganda, made it through U.S. occupation censors.

One Wonderful Sunday
1947
This is a nice Capra-esque social-realist comedy that does a great job of conveying the stifling poverty and frustrations of postwar Japan, spiced with a youthful glimmer of a brighter future. A young couple, essentially broke, meet on their Sundays for cheap dates. He's mopey, she's sunny, and the two go back and forth between enjoying their time together, and lamenting their current situation. Kurosawa in no way skirts harsh reality and presents it memorably onscreen in the form of a lost-soul child beggar, and an upscale nightclub that fronts a low-rent yakuza whorehouse. This down and dirty approach pleasantly contrasts and justifies the schmaltzy Disney-like sequences of hope, as the young man pantomimes running his own imaginary cafe amongst a literally ruined cityscape, and conducts a nonexistent orchestra in a desolate venue. This unexpected treat is one of the better films in the box.

Scandal
1950
The weakest selection in the set features Toshiro Mifune as a hunky painter who is inadvertently caught up in tabloid notoriety after an innocent encounter with a famous chanteuse at a rural inn. Taking a quasi-courtroom drama form, the picture has almost none of the genre's signature tension and feels woefully rote in its plotting. Pocketed lawyer Takashi Shimura's legal and moral predicament is fairly interesting but predictable, and the depiction and inclusion of his angelic, tubercular daughter as a sickly sweet golden child makes for near unforgivable cliche. Its hard to believe that this weak effort is bookended in Kurosawa's career by the genuinely intriguing (and very postwar) Stray Dog and the utterly classic Seven Samurai.

The Idiot
1951
A very decent adaptation of Dostoevsky's novel considering the overly ambitious production ran into trouble with the studio and thus Kurosawa's grand vision was compromised (the original cut was supposed to run close to three and a half hours). Its fairly remarkable how the easily 19th century Russian characters are altered to fit Japanese ones in a snow-blanketed postwar Hokkaido. Fans of Ozu will again be shocked to see goody-good Setsuko Hara's image twisted under Kurosawa's direction into a vampy kept-woman of the world. Lead actor Masayuki Mori's subtly un-Japanese features aid the "pure soul" outsider innocence his performance . The film has several great setpieces chock full of the rich turmoil and laden with all the madness of some of Dostoevsky's most fevered writing, particularly a defiant Setsuko Hara chucking a hefty bundle of Yen into a fireplace, and Mifune and Mori's addled chatter as they share a cold room with Mifune's murder victim.

I live in Fear
1955
The most well known film in the box also contains one of Toshiro Mifune's best roles as the overly-physical young actor transmutes his trademark swagger and growl to the bent stoop and clipped terseness of an elderly magnate. The deep seated nuclear terror of Hiroshima/Nagasak has convinced Mifune that he must move his family, mistresses and bastard children included, to the remote safety of the Brazilian countryside. Unsurprisingly, the Nakajima family has little interest in this proposed displacement and takes the issue to family court which eventually leads part-time lawyer Takashi Shimura to examine his own atomic fears. Mifune's cockeyed plan smacks of male fantasy. His vision of Brazil is a polygamist Eden that he can dictate and preside over as a wise, greying patriarch. While Nakajima senior's personal a-bomb demons tend to manifest theatrically in tortured expressions and manic fits during thunder storms, Takashi Shimura's dread is more realistic in its chilling inward contemplation. Disturbingly, the fear of these characters is not the simple vestigial zeitgeist of 50's Japan, as we continue to, and will most likely always, live in a world mere push-buttons away from annihilation.

Review by Brett A. Scieszka