When I first envisioned devoting a bi-monthly series to movies whose viewings were interrupted, never to be resumed, I imagined I'd be watching only movies where I'd gotten a good chunk of the way in -- say, at least a third. After all, there are any number of movies over the years I started watching and said, before the ten-minute mark, "No, not right now" or "No, not ever," most of which have now been forgotten by me.
As luck would have it, I also did not have a sixth movie in this series. My fifth, Withnail and I, is one I've been putting off but will finally get to in December. Until I came across the movie I watched on Thursday night, I thought I might watch Withnail in October simply to delay the decision on the sixth. I had reluctantly selected a placeholder, but was not really happy with it. That would be Blood Diamond, which technically obeyed the guidelines of this series because I had to turn it off on a plane that was landing with anywhere from five to 15 minutes remaining. But I didn't really want to watch that for this series, because I got what Blood Diamond was all about after watching more than two hours of it, and really didn't need to see whatever small amount I missed.
Sometimes, though, these things just work out felicitously.
I am also involved in a monthly series that I don't write about on this blog. I'm part of a Facebook group where we get paired up with another member of the group, and watch the highest ranked movie on their Flickchart that we haven't yet seen. For October I got assigned Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (1990), which I always thought was called Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, but now notice that most places only use the single-world title.
It wasn't until I sat down to watch it on Thursday night, for that series, that I realized it would also work for this one.
Sometime in the past 15 years -- whether it was near the beginning of that time, or as recently as five years ago, I cannot say -- I started watching Dreams. Given the methodical pacing of many of Kurosawa's films, this one in particular, I realized about ten minutes in that the "No, not right now" reasoning applied. I either started it too late, or was lying too comfortably, or any one of the other things that can kill a prospective viewing. But I watched so little of it that I didn't even really think of it for this series.
As I started watching, though, I realized I had gotten through more of it than I thought.
The third-to-last film for the great Japanese master, a personal favorite director, is constructed as a series of vignettes based on dreams that the director actually had. Given that the film is two hours long, the average length for each would be 15 minutes. It appears I watched closer to 30 minutes of the film, because it was the end of the second vignette that I remembered, as it features an orchard of blossoming peach trees. (I had remembered them as cherry trees.) I might have slept through the first one, actually, because I did not remember it at all.
Each dream features a male character of varying ages who operates as sort of a Kurosawa surrogate. There sort of seems to be an attempt to proceed chronologically, as the first two feature a young boy, who never returns as the surrogate in the later stories. Though the third vignette features the oldest surrogate, so this is less of a firm guiding principle and more of a general trajectory. The more obvious trajectory is a metaphysical one toward the concept of death, which I will try to construct for you as I describe each short. For brevity's sake I will only describe the segments, not name them, though they do have titles. I suppose I should say my ensuing description constitutes kind of a SPOILER about the film's content, if you believe it's possible to spoil a series of short films.
The first two, as discussed, feature the younger Kurosawa. In the first, he spies a wedding ritual by foxes in the forest, the foxes of course being Japanese kabuki-style performers in costumes that suggest foxes, more than trying to look like actual foxes. In the second he visits the aforementioned cherry orchard, which has been chopped down, leaving only stumps. Wood spirits -- again, these kabuki-style performers -- try to dance it into existence again as a gift for him.
Just when you think all the pieces are going to have what appears to be a feudal Japan setting -- a metaphor for the early stages of Kurosawa's career, perhaps? -- the third segment offers us a quartet of mountain climbers threatening to be lost in a blizzard. This one proceeds in a hypnotic slow motion for five minutes before introducing a similar element of the magic seen in the first two films.
The fourth may have had the most impact on me. It features a soldier, a World War II survivor, visited by ghosts of his regiment, who were all lost in battle. The ghosts have faces that are painted blue, though they don't know they have died. They emerge from a tunnel in haunting fashion. A feral dog is also present. It's an astonishing reflection on survivor's guilt and the guilt of a country over its ambitions toward world domination.
The fifth contains a surprising shift in tone as a kind of mid-movie respite. It features a man at a museum viewing the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh, and then losing himself in them. He travels through Van Gogh's watercolor landscapes until he happens upon the painter himself, played by none other than Martin Scorsese. I saw his name in the opening credits, but as he was the only actor listed in those credits, I wondered for a moment if it was actually a producer credit. This short cleared that up.
From here the movie makes a definitive turn toward the end stages of life. The sixth segment features a series of nuclear power plant explosions that light up Mount Fuji and turn it red. A number of fleeing future victims of the radiation see it coming for them in smoke of different colors as they contemplate jumping into the sea.
If that's the moment of death, the seventh vignette starts to contemplate the afterlife. This involves a man's encounter on a barren, rocky terrain with a number of weeping horned demons. It's a vision of hell if Kurosawa ever presented one.
Fortunately, Kurosawa ends on a more positive note with a vision of heaven. His middle-aged surrogate comes upon a village of unsurpassed natural beauty that also features a variety of watermills churning the water. There's a joyous funeral parade celebrating the life of a village elder. Of course, in a sense, it's a celebration of the protagonist's life, as we are meant to understand him as passing into a new realm. He underscores this by crossing a bridge over a stream and out of sight as the film's final image.
Wow.
I had thought at first that this was Kurosawa's final film, which would have made the subjects he's examining even more profound. As it turns out, he made two more, with his last film arriving in 1993, five years before his death at age 88. (I could have sworn he was over 90 when he died, but obviously I was wrong about that.)
But my how profound this is. It's not always that directors get to make films that feel like a true summation of their careers and a reckoning with their mortality, often because they don't want to think of any particular film as possibly their last. Speaking of Scorsese, at age 77 (but 75 when he made it), he's already started making films (The Irishman) that could function that way if he doesn't get to make another. Then there are those like Clint Eastwood, who doesn't seem to be interested in reflecting on his impending death even though he is now 90.
Dreams feels like it could be a greatest hits reel for Kurosawa, as it samples from a number of cinematic modes he has explored over his career, as well as types of subject matter. There are no samurai in this film -- he probably figured he'd done that enough -- but the everpresence of the kabuki-style performers feels like a shout to them. The colors and images in this film are breathtaking, though to be certain, not all of the segments are "beautiful" in the traditional sense. Kurosawa is just as interested in gray here as he is in bright reds and greens.
I wondered if I would be as engrossed in the film without a single narrative running through it. I don't dislike omnibus films, but they tend to be of varying quality, especially when multiple directors are involved. That each of these films contained something thematically potent and enriching, and that I would have a really hard time choosing a least favorite, just reminds me what a master Kurosawa was. Although I gave the film "only" 4.5 stars on Letterboxd, already two days later I'm wondering if it should have been five. It may already be among my top three favorite Kurosawa films.
Although I could go on, this is already the longest I've written about any film in this series, and I need to get on with my Saturday.
This series will conclude in December with Withnail and I.
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