Movie Review
Akira Kurosawa s Dreams (1990)
Review/Film;
Kurosawa's Magical Tales of Art, Time and Death
A solemn little boy comes out of his house one rainy morning to find the sun shining. His mother, practical and no-nonsense, looks up at the sky and says that foxes hold their wedding processions in such weather. ''They don't like to be seen by people,'' she says, and goes about her business.
The casual remark is enough to send the boy into the forest, where the trees are as large and imposing as California redwoods. Even the ferns are taller than he is. The rain glistens within the shafts of sunlight. The boy moves with a certain amount of dread. This is forbidden territory.
In a moment of pure screen enchantment, a strange wedding procession slowly comes into view, the priests in front, followed by the bridal pair, their attendants, their families, their friends and their retainers. They walk on two feet, like people, but that they are foxes is clear from the orangey whiskers on their otherwise rice-powder-white, masklike faces.
The procession appears to be choreographed. The foxes march in unison to the hollow clicking sounds of ancient musical instruments. Every few steps their haughty manner becomes furtive when, as if on cue, they abruptly pause, cock their heads to the side, listen, and then move on.
This is the sublime beginning of ''Sunshine Through the Rain,'' the first segment of the eight that compose ''Akira Kurosawa's Dreams,'' the grand new film by the 80-year-old Japanese master who, over a 40-year period, has given us ''Rashomon,'' ''Throne of Blood'' and ''Ran,'' among other classics. The film opens today at the 57th Street Playhouse.
One might have expected ''Dreams'' to be a summing up, a coda. It isn't. It's something altogether new for Kurosawa, a collection of short, sometimes fragmentary films that are less like dreams than fairy tales of past, present and future. The magical and mysterious are mixed with the practical, funny and polemical.
The movie is about many things, including the terrors of childhood, parents who are as olympian as gods, the seductive nature of death, nuclear annihilation, environmental pollution and, in a segment titled simply ''Crows,'' art. In this, the movie's least characteristic segment, Martin Scorsese, sporting a red beard and an unmistakable New York accent, appears as Vincent van Gogh, beady-eyed and intense, his head newly bandaged.
Van Gogh explains the bandage to the young Japanese artist who has somehow managed to invade the world of van Gogh's paintings, entering just down-river from the bridge at Arles: ''Yesterday I was trying to do a self-portrait, but the ear kept getting in the way.''
''Dreams'' is a willful work, being exactly the kind of film that Kurosawa wanted to make, with no apologies to anyone. Two of the segments may drive some people up the wall.
''Mount Fuji in Red'' is a kind a meta-science fiction visualization of the end of the world or, at least, of Japan. As the citizens of Tokyo panic, Mount Fuji is seen in the distance, silhouetted by the flames from the explosions of nuclear plants in the final stages of melt-down. ''But they told us nuclear plants were safe,'' someone wails.
In ''Mount Fuji in Red,'' the nightmare of nuclear holocaust, expressed in psychological terms in Kurosawa's ''I Live in Fear'' (1955), is made manifest in images of cartoonlike bluntness.
It may be no coincidence that Ishiro Honda, who has worked off and on as Kurosawa's assistant director since 1949, and is his assistant again on this film, is one of those responsible for such Japanese pop artifacts as ''Godzilla,'' ''Rodan'' and ''The Mysterians.''
''The Weeping Demon'' segment is Kurosawa's picture of a Beckett-like world, one ravaged by environmental pollution. ''Flowers are crippled,'' someone says, looking at a dandelion six feet tall. Horned mutants roam the earth. In this last pecking order before the end, demons with two horns eat those with only one.
''Dreams'' is moving both for what is on the screen, and for the set of the mind that made it.
Among other things, ''Dreams'' suggests in oblique fashion that the past does not exist. What we think of as the past is, rather, a romantic concept held by those too young to have any grasp on the meaning of age.
In this astonishingly beautiful, often somber work, emotions experienced long ago do not reappear coated with the softening cobwebs of time. They may have been filed away but, once they are recalled, they are as vivid, sharp and terrifying as they were initially. Time neither eases the pain of old wounds nor hides the scars.
For Kurosawa, the present is not haunted by the past. Instead, it's crowded by an accumulation of other present times that include the future. The job is keeping them in order, like unruly foxes.
The foxes in ''Sunshine Through the Rain'' are not especially unruly, but their power is real and implacable. When the little boy returns home from the forest, he is met by his mother, who has run out of patience with him. She hands the boy a dagger, neatly sheathed within a bamboo scabbard, and tells him the foxes have left it for him.
Since the boy has broken the law protecting the privacy of foxes, they expect him, as a boy of honor, to kill himself. The boy is bewildered. His mother sighs and says that if he can find the foxes again, he might persuade them to forgive him. In that case, he can come home. In the meantime, the door will be locked.
The boy looks hopeful. ''But,'' his mother points out, ''they don't often forgive.''
A little boy is also the ''I'' figure, the dreamer, in another magical segment, ''The Peach Orchard,'' about the fury of some imperial spirits when a peach orchard is chopped down while in bloom. The boy explains that he tried to stop the destruction. Because they believe him, the spirits allow him to see the orchard as it once was.
As these spirits, life-size dolls representing ancient emperors and the members of their courts, begin to sing, the air becomes thick with orangey-pink blossoms and the doll-figures turn into trees. The effect is exhilarating.
In ''The Blizzard,'' a mountain climber is tempted to give in to his frozen exhaustion by a beautiful demon. ''Snow is warm,'' she tells him soothingly. ''Ice is hot.'' ''The Tunnel'' is about a guilt-ridden army officer who must persuade his troops, killed in battle, that they are indeed dead, and that nothing is to be gained by trying to hang onto life.
The film's final episode, ''Village of the Watermills,'' features Chishu Ryu as a philosophical old fellow, the elder of an idyllic village where the air and water are clean, where villagers take no more from nature than they need, and where people live on so long that funerals are times of joy and celebration. The style is lyrical, the mood intended to be healing.
''Dreams'' is absolutely stunning to look at and listen to. It is, in fact, almost as much of a trip as people once thought ''Fantasia'' to be.
More important, though, is that it's a work by a director who has continued to be vigorous and productive into an age at which most film makers are supposed to go silent. Movies are a young man's game. ''Dreams'' is a report from one of the last true frontiers of cinema. ''Akira Kurosawa's Dreams'' is rated PG (''Parental Guidance Suggested''). It includes sequences that could frighten very young viewers.
AKIRA KUROSAWA'S DREAMS
Written (in Japanese with English subtitles) and directed by Akira Kurosawa; directors of photography, Takao Saito and Mashaharu Ueda; music by Shinichiro Ikebe; produced by Hisao Kurosawa and Mike Y. Inoue; released by Warner Brothers. At the 57th Street Playhouse, 110 West 57th Street. Running time: 120 minutes. This film is rated PG.
''I'' .......... Akira Terao
Vincent van Gogh .......... Martin Scorsese
Old Man .......... Chishu Ryu
Snow Fairy .......... Mieko Harada
Mother of ''I'' .......... Mitsuko Baisho
Collected by
Udayakumar.S
Govt. Model BHSS Thycaud
