Screen
Alleva, Richard
A CONJURER FALTERS KUROSAWA'S 'DREAMS' Sometimes even wizards weary of magic. The wizard in question is Akira Kurosawa, and his latest magical conjuring act is Dreams. It's an episodic film that,...
...In "Mount Fuji in Red," it is the sight of an explosion caused by three nuclear reactors malfunctioning...
...She even hands him the dagger with which to commit seppuku...
...Like the Russian master, the Japanese master thinks he has something to say about life after he has rendered life itself through the magic of his art...
...It's an episodic film that, in its first five sequences, fires up Kurosawa's admirers and justifies all the love we have ever felt for him...
...Since this single sight delivers the essence of calamity, the following denunciatory speech (spoken by a repentant scientist) would be unnecessary even if it were well written...
...In any case, the vision this boy has in the next story, "Peach Orchard," has a happy outcome: seeing the spirits of some peach trees uprooted by his parents, the child pleads for, and wins, their forgiveness...
...The first two sequences are like amazing picture books that make adults gasp as they try to read them to their kids...
...Like the aging Tolstoy forsaking his fiction for the role of moral philosopher, Kurosawa, at the very end of his career, subdues his art to preachment...
...This doesn't represent a decline in his artistry but a severe, deliberate narrowing, as if Victor Hugo had turned himself into Maurice Sendak...
...People have forgotten they are a part of nature...
...Or do the subsequent dreams constitute the foxes' curse on the boy for his spying...
...He blames himself...
...Nevertheless, the child runs off to a nearby forest to do just that...
...In "The Village of Windmills," a saintly and incredibly boring centenarian lectures a shiny-eyed student (the little boy of the first episodes now grown) on the Good Life being achievable only in a village like his where windmills produce the power and nobody watches TV...
...Yet what a relief it would be to surrender...
...But perhaps that's one invention that the old geezer would allow since Kurosawa's is fixed on him with such par-alyzingly dog-like devotion...
...He says he could blame the war for their destruction but that would be too easy...
...Quite possibly this officer led his men to the best of his ability, but the tug of the dead, absurdly slain, upon the living, absurdly spared, cannot be rationalized...
...Mountaineers cross a snowy waste during a storm...
...And when this child runs home after the foxes spot him, his mother does blame him...
...The foxes are played by masked dancers, and the wedding march is a choreographed procession both comic and scary, full of slow walking, sudden freezes, head jerks, paranoid stares...
...You mean inventions like the movie camera...
...She first tires to coax him into deathly sleep, then tries to smother him when he resists...
...What blunders has he committed...
...Kurosawa provides no explanation and is right not to do so...
...Unless the foxes forgive him, the boy must kill himself...
...I felt like retorting, "Oh, yeah...
...One shot-a full view of the tree ghosts standing in hierarchical order on rising shelves of grassland-just might be somewhere in my consciousness on the very last day of my life...
...And in each episode, the director achieves one startling image that exposes the artistic poverty of everything else in the sequence...
...Crows" is Kurosawa's tribute to Vincent van Gogh...
...Or their reward for his contrition...
...The leader, the only one who refuses to give up, is visited by a snow demon in the shape of a beautiful woman...
...They are tranquil yet somewhat frightening visions, visions of children in touch with invisible forces...
...Which it is not...
...But why...
...It's like one of those creepy visions we've all had in childhood that we never dare to speak of to our parents for fear that they will somehow blame us, as if witnessing the uncanny were a secret vice...
...Out of a pitch-black tunnel comes a regiment of slaughtered men, their faces made up like aggrieved clowns...
...Why do they make inventions which always make people unhappy...
...The boy runs off to beg forgiveness of the animals...
...In the next episode, "Blizzard," Kurosawa, creator of epic adventure stories and poet of strenuous action, is back...
...For a while, the camera is stationary while each man moves, each step a struggle, from screen right to screen left...
...And he meets the artist himself played by-brace yourself- Martin Scorsese, complete with Brooklyn accent...
...Or are they simply the visions that inevitably attend the sort of boy who witnesses the marriage of the foxes...
...For these opening sequences, Kurosawa, a major artist, has knowingly made himself into a minor artist in order to provide the sort of joy that only great minor artists like Borges or Walter De La Mare can give us: tantalizing peeks into the outskirts of consciousness...
...It seems to take forever, not because we are bored but because we are sharing their heavy-footed agony...
...We don't want to...
...But then we are gripped by the next picture...
...All three of the final episodes have the same fault: Kurosawa, thinking he has something to say with words rather than with image and action, has one character in each story talk on and on, informing the other characters, and through them the audience, of the follies of our over-mechanized, nuclear age...
...Their officer, the company's sole survivor, pleads with them to forgive him and to return to the shades...
...The Tunnel" is both primal and complex...
...The images of this episode are vivid but it is the sounds that haunt me: the pounding of the soldiers' feet in the tunnel's gloom, the snarling of a Cerberus-like dog...
...And the last shot of crows rising over a wheat-field, though copied from van Gogh, is, in its fury of movement, pure Kurosawa...
...Here is cinematic modulation of the subtlest order...
...A student literally walks into the world of the Dutch artist's canvasses...
...Our post-doomsday fears are incarnated in the very sight of "The Weeping Demon" of the next segment, but then the mutant gets to deliver his own antinuke speech...
...She knows all about it because the foxes have sent an emissary...
...Sunshine Through the Rain" describes the weather in which, as a mother tells her little boy, foxes get married...
...But, she warns, no human may attend such rites...
...Is the rest of the movie a series of visions this boy had on his way to find the foxes...
...And then the letdown...
...Here, whenever the director cuts to the next shot, it's as if he were forcing us to turn the page and get on with the story...
...And then the last three "dreams" turn us into ingrates demanding more from a master who has already given us so much...
...but this time the adventurous undertaking at hand seems to be in its death throes, and the action, however strenuous, is severely constricted...
...But, on the other hand, would you care to mention another living film director whose name could be linked with Tolstoy's in the same carping breath...
...This episode is-sometimes by turns and sometimes all at once-silly, embarrassing, delightful...
...the shouted commands of the officer as he agonizingly, lovingly drives his men back into darkness...
...As she does so, Kurosawa gives us about half a dozen quick close-ups of her face and, without greatly varying the angle of each shot, slightly alters her make-up and facial expression so that over the curse of a few seconds she changes from seductive beauty to malefic witch...
...We protest...
...To sink into the surrounding whiteness is to die...
...The beauty of these episodes resides in each mysterious, quiescent shot and not (as is usual with Kurosawa) from the linkage of dynamic images through editing...
Vol. 117 • October 1990 • No. 18
