|
|
For the Japanese film fan used to the complex films of Akira Kurosawa, the family depths of Yasujiro Ozu, or the mystical wonders of Kenji Mizoguchi, Kon Ichikawa’s 104 minute long, 1959 black-and-white war film Fires On The Plain (Nobi) is as jarring as its indelible opening scene, in which a tubercular Japanese soldier gets slapped in the face, then mercilessly berated, by his commanding officer for stupidity. The film is thoroughly modern, from its opening scene, followed by credits, to its harrowing denouement. The film’s plot is virtually nonexistent, but also the thing that makes the individual horrors and seemingly nonsensical episodes cohere. There is absurdity and humor as well. Also, even though Tamura is pathetic, he has a cruel streak, such as when he kills a native Filipina who has come with her boyfriend to retrieve salt buried under a hut. All the woman does is scream upon seeing a Japanese soldier. The boyfriend gets away in a canoe. Other horrors abound.
|
THE
HORROR
Ichikawa
directed over 80 films in a six-decade long career, but this film, and
the earlier The Burmese Harp, are still his most well known internationally,
a half a century after their releases. This film is not so much a typical
drama as it is a picaresque of death and suffering, during the Japanese
retreat from the island of Leyte in the Philippines in 1945, that only
increases in intensity with each reel. Based upon a novel by Shohei Ooka,
and adapted for the screen by the director and Natto Wada (Ichikawa’s
wife), the picture is not so dependent upon the way dialogue is spoken,
or how scenes are scripted, as much as it is on the little moments of
black humor and revelation that cranny their ways in between the larger
stuff.
There is
only one character we follow throughout the film: PFC Tamura (Eiji Funakoshi),
whose situation is one of nonstop pain and humiliation, from the slap
and berating that opens the film to his inevitable undoing. He is ordered
to return to a military hospital or kill himself with honor. His C.O.
gives him a grenade with which to do himself in, and one of the interesting
aspects of the film is that the grenade’s role goes from one of
self-death to utter impotence to possible life (if used to blow up a pond
full of fish), to a weapon of barter. The hospital, naturally, ends up
destroyed, after its head doctor tells Tamura, "I don’t care
if you’re coughing blood; if you can walk, you’re not a patient."
Tamura is thus left on his own. Although he encounters dozens of other
tired and dying people (Japanese and not), only two other characters recur
enough for the viewer to have any attachment to them: a wily old soldier
named Yasuda (Osamu Takizawa) who hustles tobacco leaves taped to his
body in exchange for food, and his dedicated helper Nagamatsu (Mickey
Curtis). 
The film succeeds
also as a work of political art; a rarity. It does so, though, because
it is wholly antithetical to politics in every form. The retreating army
could be any defeated army in history, from the Peloponnesian War right
up to the American debacle in Vietnam and beyond. The film is utterly
uninvolved, which paradoxically makes the "action," such as
it is, all the more involving and fascinating, as if a medical examiner
were dissecting a corpse. The camera is impartial, just the proverbial
uninvolved watcher. Thus the movie also does a nice job of undercutting
the myth of the Japanese soldiers as utterly devoted followers of the
Emperor, with no minds of their own. These soldiers are crass, cynical,
and each out for themselves--just like their American counterparts.
The only
things that do not work in the film are the special effects and Yasushi
Akutagawa’s melodramatic, strident, and often emotionally inapt
musical score. As for the effects? One hears American air raids, yet no
planes are seen in the sky, and the damage they inflict is very low scale,
reflective of the limited budget the Daiei Studio provided Ichikawa. Yet
the story and acting are so bleakly realistic that most people will barely
notice the paltry effects. And, after all, Saving Private Ryan
proved that great special effects means only that a film has great special
effects, nothing more.
The film
subtly takes digs at the American enemy, who would later occupy the Japanese
homeland. It portrays the Americans as unable to stop Filipino guerilla
retribution on the Japanese soldiers who try to surrender, for often they
are gunned down by the native soldiers who are in league with the Americans.
For this and other matters, some critics have labeled the film as either
propagandistic, in its not portraying the barbarisms the Japanese inflicted
upon the Philippines, or slyly subversive in its approach to the American
conduct of the war. After all, we also see the results of American barbarity:
the bombing of an army hospital. Also, the Japanese title of the film,
Nobi, means a caste system of servitude or slavery in ancient Korea, and
it spins the film in another direction--that not only are the Japanese
soldiers defeated and worn out by the war against the Americans, but they
are mere pawns or puppets of the ruling class of their own country.
The
DVD, put out by The Criterion Collection, lacks a film commentary, which
is most disappointing, since many of the new releases by the company,
since it switched over to the new semi-circle C logo, also lack a commentary.
Is the vaunted Criterion starting to skimp on its DVD releases? That would
be a shame, for they are often an excellent supplement to enhance an understanding
of the film as art, but also as history, in cases such as this. The film
itself looks quite good, in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, and does include a
video introduction by Japanese film scholar Donald Richie. Unfortunately,
like many of Richie’s comments and analyses of films on other DVDs,
this one is rather generic. A bit more interesting is an interview segment
with the director, as well as Mickey Curtis, who talks of the rigors of
the film, as well as his fame as a 1950s Japanese teenybopper singer.
The film has Criterion’s often difficult to read white subtitles--always
a downer on a black and white film, and the lack of an English language
dubbed track is annoying, for it would have really helped. The DVD insert
has an ok essay by film critic Chuck Stephens.
All in all,
Fires On the Plain is an excellent film that, while lacking the
technical panache of a Kurosawa film, and the narrative laser of an Ozu
film, is one of the best war (or anti-war) films ever made, for it takes
a conceit as simple as that found in Lord Of The Flies, and overlays
it upon the tapestry of the greatest conflict in human history, for the
losers of that war are also stuck on an island and in charge of their
own small "civilization." It also, interestingly, provides a
glimpse into what might have been on the minds of those fabled Japanese
soldiers found stuck on Pacific atolls decades after the war’s end.
These and many other reasons enumerated and not, make the film, if not
a must-see, then certainly a film one is better for having seen.