More Endings

Akira Kurosawa's High And Low is another of his films that really stretches form, but it all aids in the denouement.

As I wrote:

Filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer once opined about mood defining a story. He stated: ‘Imagine we are sitting in an ordinary room. Suddenly we are told that there is a corpse behind the door. In an instant, the room we are sitting in is completely altered: everything in it has taken on another level; the light, the atmosphere have changed, though they are physically the same. This is because we have changed.…This is the effect I want to get.’ Alfred Hitchcock used this ploy in one of his best films, Rope, whose entirety is sort of an inverse of this film’s first 55 minutes, while Kurosawa follows a parallel track in regards to character. What changes in the scene on the train is not a willful manipulation of a character, by a screenwriter, but an organic and believable flowering into character, due to circumstances that are not contrived. Instead of knowing of a corpse behind the door, the audience’s first hour has let us become that corpse- or thing, with knowledge of itself. In essence, we know what Gondo will do because his character has been so skillfully revealed, despite many seeming moments that paint him as something other than his true self. That the remainder of the film shows a more complacent Gondo (check out the scene where he whistles as he mows his own lawn) is, thus, not in the least implausible, for it is the logical outcome of all that has gone before.

This is one of the cardinal rules of quality fiction (in any genre) that is always violated by the Dumbest Possible Action and the us of dei ex machina. Kurosawa, in this film, shows that by following logic and rules, one can still totally leave a percipient engaged and questioning his experience.

That's why he's a great artist.

More Kurosawa

Above is a clip from Akira Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well. It is one of the great filmmaker's best films.

Oddly, although he is more well known for his period piece costume dramas, I think the master was better in films like this, Ikiru, and High And Low- all drama set in then Modern Japan.

In my review of the film I wrote:

The film does a wonderful job of showing the utter corruption that is inevitable with the eternal corporate mindset that slacks off public responsibility for mere profit, and the particularly Japanese obsession with falling on the sword, so to speak, for one’s superiors. Wada says, ‘You don’t understand bureaucrats. A good official never implicates a superior, no matter what the cost.’ He later tells Nishi, ‘You’re up against a terrifying system that will never yield,’ to which Nishi replies, ‘Everyone feels that way and gives up. That’s how they get away with it.’ But, ultimately, it is the long kowed Wada who is correct. The saddest thing is the corruption this film details is so minor league today that it seems almost childish compared to Enron, Worldcom, and the many others in the years since. In a sense, Iwabuchi isn’t even the top criminal in the film. That would belong to the corporation’s little seen President, Arimura (Ken Mitsuda), who, late in the film, when things seem to be going against the corporation, even sends over a vial of poison for Iwabuchi to do himself in, in case things don’t go well. Ever the corporate toady, Iwabuchi nor only thanks his superior for the vial, but for even telling him the correct dosage needed for death. Watching this film, far more than any of the period pieces put out, explains exactly how the militarists that arose in the early Twentieth Century were so easily able to lead their country down the path to near oblivion.

Yet, while being a cogent film on the tenor of then Modern Japan, it is also a damned good thriller, something even the brain dead fare of today cannot match. It also puts Hitchcock to shame.