| Under the Flag of the Rising
Sun is an absolutely superb and highly engrossing,
haunting and powerful anti-war film from my favorite
Japanese director: Kinji
Fukasaku. Fukasaku is the man responsible
for everything from the stunningly brutal Battle
Royale to the campy The Green Slime
to highly entertaining Legend of the Eight
Samurai to to the gritty and superb Graveyard
of Honor. There's something for everybody
to love in his repertoire of cinema. Under
the Flag of the Rising Sun could be his finest
film, a war film very much on par with such works
as Der Untergang and Full Metal Jacket.
Fresh from co-directing the Japanese segments
as Akira
Kurosawa's replacement for the Pearl Harbor
epic Tora! Tora! Tora!, Fukasaku was
so grabbed by the subject material of the book
from which this film is based that he bought the
rights for it using the large paycheck he received
from Tora! Tora! Tora!, penning a script
with The Island and Onibaba
(1964) director Kaneto Shindo.
The film's main character is a
widow, Sakie, whose husband was executed in New
Guinea, allegedly for desertion, at the tail end
of World War II. Every year, on the anniversary
of Japan's defeat, she goes to Tokyo to try and
get information on how her husband really died
and get his name cleared so that he can honored
in the Emperor memorial service. She is finally
given a list of men who served in the same battalion
as her husband, whom she proceeds to track down.
In the style of Kurosawa's Rashomon,
each tells a very different interpretation of
how her husband died, from that he died heroically
charging into battle to that he was executed for
committing acts of cannibalism.
If there's one thing I will say
about Under the Flag of the Rising Sun
is that it's not for the squeamish. It's highly
upsetting and emotionally devastating, but it's
also a highly important and powerful film about
the horrors of warfare. It's likely the most graphic
film to bear the famous Toho logo. Kinji
Fukasaku, in his raging condemnation of war
and the cruelty of man, spares little detail,
showing starvation, pestilence, executions and
even cannibalism. The film has many disturbing
and shocking moments, made all the more potent
by many real life black and white World War II
stills that Fukasaku utilizes often in the film.
Fukasaku, however, never veers into exploitation
territory like many other directors have when
covering disturbing historical subject matter.
The film is quite a powerful one, making a very
valid point: it was the government of Japan that
started the Pacific War, so why must its people
suffer because of it? Between this, Battle
Royale and Battles Without Honor and
Humanity, it becomes quite obvious: Kinji
Fukasaku had no love for mankind and its cruelty
and that's what made him Kinji Fukasaku. It's
quite a daring film, really, considering it comes
from a country well known for its conservatism.
Technically, the film is simply
masterful. First off, Fukasaku's direction is
absolutely superb. Interestingly enough, it was
in this film in which Fukasaku began experimenting
with several filmic techniques that he would become
well known for using with his yakuza films such
as Battles Without Honor and Humanity and
Graveyard of Honor: gritty, handheld
camera work, alternating film stocks, freeze frames
and stills. All these techniques work incredibly
well and really add to the film's emotional wallop.
The film frequently switches from color to tinted
black and white for the flashbacks to New Guinea,
occasionally warping back to color for emotional
impact. The cinematography by Hiroshi Segawa,
who prior to this lensed Hiroshi Teshigahara's
The Pitfall, Woman in the Dunes
and Face of Another, is superb and the
film, as I said, utilizes handheld cameras for
most of the camera movement and this film is also
one of Fukasaku's first to use tilted or dutch
angled shots, which would also be utilized by
several of Fukasaku's Nippon contemporaries, including
Shunya Ito for his stellar Female Prisoner
Scorpion films. The music is not by Fukasaku's
usual composer, Toshiaki Tsushima, but by Kaneto
Shindo's composer Hikaru Hayashi, who provided
the booming score for Onibaba
(2004) years prior and gives a more understated
and melancholy score here. The score is, at times,
quite beautiful.
The acting is simply superb. The
sadly just recently deceased Tetsuro
Tamba, who worked with Fukasaku from every
thing from his early film Greed in Broad Daylight
to his space opera Message From Space,
stars as Sgt. Togami and I really think this could
be his finest hour. The film, however, really
belongs to Sachiko Hidari as his widow, still,
grieving for her beloved husband 30 years later.
The rest of the cast are not too well known. In
terms of character development, the film belongs
mostly to Hidari's character, who, in her quest
to find out the truth, goes through several emotional
phases before she realizes that her husband's
soul will never rest in peace. She also, after
spending the whole film trying to get her husband's
name cleared so that he can be honored by the
Emperor, comes to the realization, after hearing
Terajima's final story, that it's not that he
is unfit to be honored by the Emperor, it's that
the Emperor is unfit to honor him. For, as I said,
a film coming from Japan, this is quite a daring
message.
All and all, the film is fantastic
and one of my very favorite films, though I can't
say I would recommend it to those more familiar
with Toho's lighter fare. |
(5/5)
