ON THE SCREEN
Rhapsody in August by Akira Kurosawa (1991). When I watched this recently for the second time, I had forgotten much about this rather sentimental film. It's not surprising why; of Kurosawa's films, this must be one of the least polished.
In brief: It follows an old grandmother as she takes care of her four grandchildren in her small home outside Nagasaki, relating her experiences, and through her other Japanese's experiences, of the Second World War generally and the atomic bombing of Nagasaki specifically. The children tour Nagasaki and its monuments to the war, with some maudlin and gratuitous commentary at each site, and go about their daily lives hearing every once in a while about their parents' trip to Hawaii where they are visiting one of Grandma's brothers and his family (starring Richard Gere as Clark, her nephew). The children eventually convince Grandma to go to Hawaii to visit her dying brother, one of 11 or so, but only after performing her rituals of remembrance for her husband, who was killed in the 1945 atomic bombing. This culminates in a moving final scene following his death.
Like many of Kurosawa's films -- his samurai-epics being obvious exceptions -- this film uses the mundane for expository material, to bring out the universal in one's everyday experience of the world. It is thus more of a character study and a piece of social criticism than a drama as such, but the latter is drawn in such broad strokes and without almost any serious regard for the complexity of the issue that it tends to drown out the viewer's feelings for the characters at times. This is not to say that Kurosawa has just dropped down a few people on stage to serve, Michael-Moore-style, as a platform for political pontification; the Grandmother, above all, is a real person, who is caught up in a living history she finds difficult to escape. Her ultimate regret at not having visited her brother also cleverly serves both as an intimate view of an otherwise austere woman's conflicted feelings, and as a political metaphor for Japan's need to move beyond the harsh feelings of the past. (This despite the fact she had said she no longer feels anger towards the Americans.)
All of this makes the movie something more than just a screed against nuclear weapons. And yet apostrophes on the wretchedness of war do not really constitute an argument about whether the actual use of nuclear weapons was justified. Most of us will agree that war is something to be avoided, and that the bombing of civilians in urban areas even more so. Yet one never hears in this film about alternatives to the bombings, or whether there was any difference between this particular act, and the one that preceded it in Hiroshima or, perhaps more pointedly, the leveling of Tokyo with conventional weapons earlier in the war. Would an invasion of the Japanese mainland have cost even
more lives, Japanese and American than the bombings? For that matter, were the cluster bombings of German cities half a world away, such as in Dresden, justified? Kurosawa not only suggests no answers to such questions, he does not even acknowledge the questions' existence. The whole debate is very simple in this film: war is bad. Given that most of us would also agree other values were at stake in the war (democracy, human rights, etc.), providing this kind of answer is simplistic, and discredits the very points that Kurosawa wants to raise. From such a respected director, this is a shame.
