RHAPSODY IN AUGUST *** (A must-see) Directed and written by Akira Kurosawa With Sachiko Murase, Hisashi Igawa, Mie Suzuki, Tomoko Ohtakara, Mitsunori Isaki, Hidetaka Yoshioka, and Richard Gere.
Given the awesome size of Kurosawa’s achievement over half a century, I fully admit that this bias is more than a little churlish. Indeed, now that I find that his latest feature, Rhapsody in August, is being castigated across the globe for its sentimentality and irrelevance, it seems like a good time to come to Kurosawa’s defense, especially since I find this film at the very least more affecting and accomplished than any of his movies since Kagemusha (1980).
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Kane has already spilled the beans about her husband in her letter to Hawaii, and Clark arrives to visit them soon after the return of Tadeo and his wife, deeply moved by the news and eager to learn more. After attending the memorial ceremony commemorating the death of his uncle and other victims of the Nagasaki holocaust, he receives word that his own father has died, and takes the next plane back to Hawaii. The family plans to follow him, but Kane, grief-stricken by her failure to see her brother again before he died, begins to re-experience the past directly. (As one of the grandchildren puts it, “The clock in her head is running backwards.”) Waking during a thunderstorm, she rushes out of the house into the rain, believing that the bomb is falling, and in protracted slow-motion, the members of her family chase after her, never catching up.
The film’s poetry isn’t merely a matter of this overall pastoral ambiance, some of which could also be found in Dreams, but also a matter of illustration and inflection, visible in both the framing and the editing. We learn that one of Kane’s long-dead brothers, who lost all his hair when the bomb fell, spent most of his time afterwards drawing eyes; one of the grandchildren draws a similar eye on a blackboard, and Kurosawa briefly and effectively cuts back to this eye at later stages. When Kane later recalls the flash of the explosion itself as a giant eye, the film promptly illustrates this surreal vision–a gigantic eye opening between the sky and the mountains. And when two of the grandchildren return home one day from the cedar grove, they learn that an old lady, another survivor of the explosion, is visiting Kane without either of the old women saying a word; beautifully violating a standard rule of editing, the film cuts directly from a shot of the two of them framed through an open window to a closer shot from the same angle inside the room, with each woman situated at opposite ends of the frame.
