Fires on the Plain (Kon Ichikawa, 1959)

Tamura: Eiji Funakoshi
Yasuda: Osamu Takizawa
Nakamatsu: Mickey Curtis
Sergeant: Mantaro Ushio
Army surgeon: Kyu Sazanaka
Officer: Yoshihiro Hamaguchi
Soldier: Hikaru Hoshi
Soldier: Asao Sano
Soldier: Masaya Tsukida

Director: Kon Ichikawa
Screenplay: Natto Wada
Based on a novel by Shohei Ooka
Cinematography: Setsuo Kobayashi
Production design: Atsuji Shibata
Film editing: Tatsuji Nakashizu
Music: Yasushi Akutagawa

War films often have much in common with horror movies: the impending dread, the omnipresence of death and mutilation. But none that I've seen goes quite so far in that direction as Kon Ichikawa's Fires on the Plain, which eventually takes on the character of a zombie movie. I don't mean that flippantly or facetiously, because Fires on the Plain is very much a serious film, thoughtful and unsparing in its treatment of the horrors of war. But the images of a swarm of Japanese soldiers crawling across a road in the near-dark and of starving, wounded men staggering toward a hoped-for rescue inevitably evoke those movies and TV series about the walking undead. From the beginning, the film's protagonist, Tamura, is one of those undead figures: Gaunt and tubercular, he is turned away from his company of soldiers making a last-ditch stand because he is of no use as a fighter, and sent back to the field hospital from which he has already been turned away. The officer who sends him off gives him a grenade and tells him that if the hospital won't take him, he's to blow himself up. Tamura doesn't do that, but he begins a long trek across Leyte as things go ever worse for the Japanese, targets not only of the American army but even more so of the vengeful Filipinos -- at one point, an American convoy stops to take prisoners, but a Filipina accompanying the Americans gleefully guns them down instead. Eventually, the most zombie-like thing of all happens to Tamura: He comes face to face with starving soldiers who are eating human flesh. Some of them call it "monkey meat," but one mad and dying man offers his own body to Tamura as food. With this premise, the film could have gone deep into sensationalism -- or worse, into Christian iconography -- but Ichikawa makes it clear that the cannibalism he portrays is a metaphor for the ultimate degradation of war. Critics are often puzzled by Ichikawa's career, which is marked by a great variety of films, all of them made with extreme technical finesse. His other great anti-war film, The Burmese Harp (1956), for example, has moments of lyricism and tenderness that are completely absent from Fires on the Plain. So if you're looking for the consistency of an auteur, you won't find it in his work. But that doesn't keep him from being an extraordinarily daring filmmaker.   

The Burmese Harp (Kon Ichikawa, 1956)

Shoji Yasui in The Burmese Harp

Capt. Inouye: Rentaro Mikuni
Pvt. Mizushima: Shoji Yasui
Ito: Jun Hamamura
Kobayashi: Taketoshi Naito
Maki: Shunji Kasuga
Baba: Ko Nishimura
Oyama: Tomio Aoki
Old Woman: Tanie Kitabayashi

Director: Kon Ichikawa
Screenplay: Natto Wada
Based on a novel by Michio Takeyama
Cinematography: Minoru Yokayama
Film editing: Masanori Tsujii
Music: Akira Ifukube

No film that contains as many reprises of Henry Bishop's old parlor song "Home, Sweet Home" as Kon Ichikawa's The Burmese Harp does can escape charges of sentimentality. It's sung in both Japanese and English by male choruses accompanied by the titular harp -- which sounds a lot more like a full-size orchestral harp than the smaller Burmese saung that appears on the screen. But although the film contains scenes of the carnage of war, Ichikawa is clearly not aiming for realism here. The source of the film was a novel serialized in a children's magazine in 1946 that became an adult bestseller when it was published as a book. The book was designed as antiwar statement, a corrective to the militarism that had plunged Japan into disaster, and Ichikawa's film, which elaborates on the book's themes of Buddhist pacifism, still retains some of the power to stir sentiments in that direction. It focuses on Mizushima, member of a company of Japanese soldiers led by Capt. Inouye, who had been a music teacher before by war and tries to keep up morale as they trek through the Burmese jungle by having the men sing. Mizushima has found a harp and learned to play it extremely well, accompanying the singing as well as using the harp when he goes on reconnaissance missions, playing one tune for "all clear" and another for "danger." When the war ends, the company is sent to a temporary prison camp, from which Mizushima is sent out to try to persuade a recalcitrant group of Japanese soldiers that the war is over and they should surrender. The fanatics refuse, but Mizushima is unable to leave their hillside stronghold before the deadline passes and the place is shelled, killing most of the holdouts and leaving Mizushima unconscious. The company moves on, thinking Mizushima dead, and are about to be repatriated when they discover that he has survived. A flashback tells how Mizushima became a Buddhist monk, so devoted to the task of burying the Japanese corpses that still remain in the Burmese countryside that he refuses to return to Japan. The Burmese Harp is beautifully filmed by Minoru Yokayama, and became an international hit. There have been charges that the film "whitewashes" the Japanese campaign in Burma, ignoring atrocities committed under orders from the Japanese high command, and this criticism deserves to be heard. But the underlying antiwar fable of the film still holds its strength.

Conflagration (Kon Ichikawa, 1958)

Tatsuya Nakadai and Raizo Ichikawa in Conflagration 

Goichi Mizoguchi: Raizo Ichikawa
Tokari: Tatsuya Nakadai
Tayama Dosen: Ganjiro Nakamura
Tsurukawa: Yoichi Funaki
Goichi's Mother: Tanie Kitabayashi
Goichi's Father: Jun Hamamura

Director: Kon Ichikawa
Screenplay: Keiji Hasebe, Kon Ichikawa, Notto Wada
Based on a novel by Yukio Mishima
Cinematography: Kazuo Miyagawa
Music: Toshiro Mayuzumi

I haven't read the Yukio Mishima novel, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, on which Conflagration is based, but the film has the earmarks of an adaptation from a novel, including incidents, such as Goichi's vandalizing the sword of a naval cadet who mocked him, and such secondary characters as Tsurukawa, the fellow acolyte who befriends him, whose treatment feels truncated, as if their narrative and symbolic weight was greater in the book than Kon Ichikawa was able to give them in the film. But the fine performances of Raizo Ichikawa, Ganjiro Nakamura, and Tatsuya Nakadai help Conflagration succeed on its own. Ichikawa plays a young Buddhist acolyte, Goichi, whose stammer has made him an outcast, and whose troubled childhood only worsens his sense of alienation. Nakamura plays the head priest at a temple, who studied with Goichi's father and takes the young man in out of a sense of duty, eventually paying his way to the university. There, Goichi meets another outcast, Tokari, whose deformed leg has caused him to become bitter and cynical. Although Goichi retains his shyness and naïveté, the two bond as outcasts, with Tokari's darkly rebellious philosophy eventually infecting the young acolyte, provoking him to the destructive act that gives the film its title. Nakadai's intensity in the role gives the sometimes plodding narrative, with its flashbacks within flashbacks, a needed jolt.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies

Odd Obsession (Kon Ichikawa, 1959)

Tatsuya Nakadai in Odd Obsession 

Ikuko Kenmochi: Machiko Kyo
Kenji Kenmochi: Ganjiro Nakamura
Toshiko Kenmochi: Junko Kano
Kimura: Tatsuya Nakadai
Hana: Tanie Kitabayashi
Masseur: Ichiro Sugai
Dr. Kodama: Mantaro Ushio
Dr. Soma: Jun Hamamura

Director: Kon Ichikawa
Screenplay: Keiji Hasebe, Kon Ichikawa, Notto Wada
Based on a novel by Jun'ichiro Tanizaki
Cinematography: Kazuo Miyagawa
Music: Yasushi Akutagawa

As with so many foreign-language films, the English title Odd Obsession seems to miss the mark a little, but the Japanese title, Kagi, which means "The Key," also seems a little off-target, even though it was taken from the novel on which the film was based. If I were retitling it, I'd call the film something like "The Jealousy Cure," which is not only in keeping with the plot but is also supported by the way the film opens, as if presenting a case study: We see a man in a physician's white coat standing before an anatomy chart, speaking directly at the camera. He describes the various effects of aging on the body before turning away to enter the action of the scene. We learn that he is Kimura, an intern in the clinic of Dr. Soma, who is treating a post-middle-aged man, Kenji Kenmochi, for sexual dysfunction. The doctor advises Kenji that the injections he has been giving him are probably ineffective, and that he should try to find other ways of dealing with the problem. Kimura has also been dating Kenji's daughter, Toshiko, and he has let slip to her that her father is seeing Dr. Soma. She passes the information along to her mother, Ikuko, whom we then see visiting Dr. Soma to find out if there is something she can do for her husband. It's an awkward encounter: Ikuko is rather embarrassed by the subject of their sex life, but she resolves to do what she can to help. Kenji then discovers that his libido is stirred by the thought of anyone having sex with his much younger wife, and when Kimura comes to dinner, Kenji begins to plot ways of bringing his wife and the young and handsome intern together. As Kimura and Ikuko begin an affair -- the key from the Japanese title is the one she gives Kimura to the back gate -- Kenji's sex drive reawakens, with the added consequence of dangerously elevating his blood pressure. Odd Obsession is not so much a case study, however, as an ironic dark comedy, one in which the follies of the various characters lead to what might be a tragic conclusion if viewed from another angle than the one Ichikawa chooses. It's also a showcase for the versatility of Tatsuya Nakadai and Michiko Kyo, who reteamed seven years later for the more serious The Face of Another (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1966). I think Ichikawa is a little too interested in "trying things out," such as the opening segue from breaking the fourth wall into starting the action of the film, or the freeze frames that interrupt the action in the opening section, tricks that don't feel consistent with the rest of Odd Obsession.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies

Princess From the Moon (Kon Ichikawa, 1987)

In eighth-century Japan, a man (Toshiro Mifune) and his wife (Ayako Wakao) are mourning the death of their 5-year-old daughter, Kaya. They live beside a forest of bamboo, whose stalks the man cuts and turns into baskets and other artifacts, which he sells to make a living. One night they see a bright light and their hut is shaken by a huge tremor. The next morning, when the man goes out to investigate he finds near his daughter's grave a large egg-shaped object. It begins to crack open and as he watches, a baby crawls from it and begins to grow rapidly until it assumes the form of his dead child. The man and his wife raise the girl as their daughter, Kaya, and discover that the egg-shaped object from which she emerged is pure gold, so they become rich enough to move into a large house. Kaya swiftly grows into a young woman (Yasuko Sawaguchi) whose beauty attracts high-born suitors. But she has brought with her a small crystal ball that eventually reveals her secret: She is from the moon, the sole survivor when the ship that was carrying her crashed. To ward off her suitors, she proposes impossible tasks to win her hand. And then the ball reveals that at the next full moon, a ship will arrive to carry her home. The entire realm has fallen in love with Kaya, and on the night of the full moon, troops are stationed about the house to shoot down any arriving ships. Up to this point, Kon Ichikawa's Princess From the Moon has been a charmingly magical fantasy film, a smart adaptation of an ancient Japanese folktale, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, with beautiful sets by Shinobu Muraki, costumes by Emi Wada, and color cinematography by Setsuo Kobayashi. But suddenly Ichikawa imposes on the setting a spaceship out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977), and Kaya is drawn up into it in flowing robes and accompanied by what appear to be glowing cherubs, an image that recalls Renaissance paintings of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, like this one by Rubens:

It's a startling shift in tone and technique, to say the least, especially when compounded by the insertion of a pop song, "Stay With Me," by Peter Cetera behind the end credits. Critics, too, were jarred by the overlaying of a sci-fi trope on a traditional tale, but audiences seemed to like it. A somewhat more traditional version of the story, The Tale of the Princess Kagya (Isao Takahata), was produced by Studio Ghibli in 2013 and was nominated for the animated feature Oscar.

The Makioka Sisters (Kon Ichikawa, 1983)

I haven't read the novel by Junichiro Tanizaki on which Kon Ichikawa based The Makioka Sisters, but it seems to me that he has turned it into something like a Jane Austen novel made by Merchant Ivory.* The lushly melancholy scene at the beginning of the film in which the sisters walk through the blossoming cherry orchards in Kyoto, accompanied by an instrumental arrangement of Handel's aria "Ombra mai fu" from Serse, anticipates by two years the scenes in Tuscany in the Merchant Ivory version of E.M. Forster's A Room With a View (James Ivory, 1985) that are set to music like Puccini's "O mio babbino caro" and "Chi il bel sogno di Doretta." The Jane Austen parallel is even stronger: The plot consists of finding a husband for one of the sisters, Yukiko (Sayuri Yoshinaga), whose marital prospects are endangered by the unconventional behavior of her younger sister, Taeko (Yuko Kotegawa), just as Jane and Elizabeth Bennet's were by the scandalous behavior of their sister, Lydia, in Pride and Prejudice. And just as Austen's novels took place against the distant background of the Napoleonic wars, so do the Japanese military incursions into China -- the film begins in the spring of 1938 -- recede into the background of the domestic problems of the Makioka sisters. There are four Makioka sisters, the proud remnants of a family whose male line has died out, but the husbands of the two oldest sisters, Tsuruko (Keiko Kishi) and Sachiko (Yoshiko Sakuma), have adopted the family name and are helping rebuild its fortunes. The sisters adhere to the family tradition that older sisters must marry before younger, which Taeko, the youngest, rebels against. As the film begins, she has already tried to elope with the irresponsible Okuhata (Yonedanji Katsura), and although the family thwarted that attempt, the story made it into the newspapers, which incorrectly reported Yukiko as the one who tried to elope. The family demands a retraction, but the newspaper only issues a correction. Yukiko is beautiful but shy, and attempts by a matchmaker to arrange a marriage for her have fallen through. There is a wonderful scene in which the family goes to meet a suitor, who turns out to be a terrible but funny bore. Ichikawa, who co-wrote the screenplay with Shinya Hidaka, develops and individualizes the characters of the sisters and their husbands well, and stays just this side of romantic sentimentality. The cinematography by Kiyoshi Hasegawa makes the most of the colorful settings -- spring cherry blossoms and autumn foliage -- and especially the beautiful costumes of Keiko Harada and Ikuko Murakami. Only occasionally does the note intrude that this is an ephemeral world, soon to be swept away by war.

*No, I know. Ismail Merchant and James Ivory never filmed a Jane Austen book. But those who did, like Ang Lee with Sense and Sensibility (1995), were surely working in the Merchant Ivory mode.