As the flip side to David Lean's "The Bridge on the River Kwai", filmmaker Kon Ichikawa's 1956 anti-war parable takes place in the same sweltering Burmese jungle but at the very end of the war in 1945. By this time, the British troops have the upper hand, and a demoralized Japanese battalion led by the indefatigable Captain Inouye has peacefully surrendered. However, there is a fanatical unit of Japanese soldiers cloistered in a nearby mountain, and Private Mizushima accepts a risky mission to convince them to surrender. He fails valiantly and is left for dead after a hailstorm of gunfire. What happens next is tracked in two intertwining story lines - the first is the spiritual journey of Mizushima as he is traumatically affected by the overwhelming number of casualties he sees on his way back to the prison camp where the rest of his troop has been sent; the second is about Inouye and his men and how they use music to reconcile themselves to defeat and rebuilding their lives after the war.
Considering how graphic many of the images are, it's hard to believe that the screenplay written by Ichikawa's wife Natto Wada was actually based on a young adult novel with an almost fairy tale tone. Yet, some of the more fanciful elements remain in the movie, in particular, the magical affinity that Mizushima shows when he fluently plays a handmade harp and the insistent use of the overly familiar "Home, Sweet Home" as a connective plot device between the opposing sides of the war. If one can embrace such contrivances, then the rest of the allegorical movie begins to resonate on a deeper level. What helps immeasurably is Ichikawa's clear-eyed sense of narrative flow as Wada's script reveals the character transformations in human-size terms. The one drawback to this subtle approach is the overly symbolic leap that Mizushima makes from dutiful soldier to pacifist Buddhist monk. It feels far more like the personification of a country's postwar metamorphosis than an honest change in outlook, whereas Inouye's overwhelming feeling of accountability over Mizushima's fate grounds the film in a more certain reality.
The two key performances reflect this divergence - Shoji Yasui is sincere and often powerful but dramatically opaque as Mizushima, while Rentaro Mikuni maintains a forceful presence as Inouye with a prevailing humanity. The Criterion Collection does its usual stellar job in restoring the pristine condition of the original film highlighting the crisp black-and-white cinematography of Minoru Yokoyama. At the same time, this is not one of their more robust packages. Even though film scholar Tony Rayns contributes an informative essay on the accompanying booklet, there is surprisingly no commentary track on the 2007 DVD. There is, however, two recent featurettes included - a 16-minute interview with Ichikawa, probably the least known of the Japanese masters, conducted in 2005 when he was turning ninety; and a 12-minute interview with Mikuni. Both are insightful on a cursory level, though they do beg for follow-up viewing of Ichikawa's other classic films. The remaining extra is the original theatrical trailer. One wonders if Clint Eastwood saw this film in preparation for his own "Letters from Iwo Jima" since they share an observant eye for the distinct emotionalism unique to the Japanese mindset during WWII.
Considering how graphic many of the images are, it's hard to believe that the screenplay written by Ichikawa's wife Natto Wada was actually based on a young adult novel with an almost fairy tale tone. Yet, some of the more fanciful elements remain in the movie, in particular, the magical affinity that Mizushima shows when he fluently plays a handmade harp and the insistent use of the overly familiar "Home, Sweet Home" as a connective plot device between the opposing sides of the war. If one can embrace such contrivances, then the rest of the allegorical movie begins to resonate on a deeper level. What helps immeasurably is Ichikawa's clear-eyed sense of narrative flow as Wada's script reveals the character transformations in human-size terms. The one drawback to this subtle approach is the overly symbolic leap that Mizushima makes from dutiful soldier to pacifist Buddhist monk. It feels far more like the personification of a country's postwar metamorphosis than an honest change in outlook, whereas Inouye's overwhelming feeling of accountability over Mizushima's fate grounds the film in a more certain reality.
The two key performances reflect this divergence - Shoji Yasui is sincere and often powerful but dramatically opaque as Mizushima, while Rentaro Mikuni maintains a forceful presence as Inouye with a prevailing humanity. The Criterion Collection does its usual stellar job in restoring the pristine condition of the original film highlighting the crisp black-and-white cinematography of Minoru Yokoyama. At the same time, this is not one of their more robust packages. Even though film scholar Tony Rayns contributes an informative essay on the accompanying booklet, there is surprisingly no commentary track on the 2007 DVD. There is, however, two recent featurettes included - a 16-minute interview with Ichikawa, probably the least known of the Japanese masters, conducted in 2005 when he was turning ninety; and a 12-minute interview with Mikuni. Both are insightful on a cursory level, though they do beg for follow-up viewing of Ichikawa's other classic films. The remaining extra is the original theatrical trailer. One wonders if Clint Eastwood saw this film in preparation for his own "Letters from Iwo Jima" since they share an observant eye for the distinct emotionalism unique to the Japanese mindset during WWII.