It helps knowing Sternberg's previous films to appreciate this unique masterpiece, a strange and utterly original summation of the themes that obsessed him throughout his career.
Some posters here complain about the all-Japanese dialog not being subtitled and the constant narration undercutting suspense and making it hard to get "involved" in the story, as one expects to do with most films. This is perfectly understandable since what Sternberg is doing here is totally original, daring and unexpected.
These distancing tactics are deliberate artistic choices. Sternberg doesn't want us to be caught up in the story. He wants us to cooly observe the characters as the narrator does, the way a biologist might observe animals in a lab. He chooses the most foreign (to Western viewers) milieu, to show the universality of human desire, conflict and violence.
Everything adds to the sense of contemplation and detachment. Sternberg traveled halfway around the world only to shoot the film in a studio! Where he creates a jungle as stylized and surreal as you'd find in a Japanese woodcut, a claustrophobic world that traps his hapless characters. They crawl around like microbes in what resembles a giant brain.
It's as if we the viewers are space aliens being given a dispassionate guided tour of human behavior by the narrator, who speaks in first person as one of the survivors, but we never learn which one.
Having created some of the strangest, most surreal movies ever produced in Hollywood (THE SCARLET EMPRESS, THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN), Sternberg goes even more strange and surreal in this one, although the acting is more naturalistic than usual for him.
His Marlene Dietrich films center around a mysterious woman upon whom men project their desires for sex, love, violence and revenge. Here Keiko is the final mystic Sternberg temptress. Like Concha in THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN, she watches, calmly bemused, as the men fight, kill, and die to possess her. Like all the classic Sternberg heroines, she is a free agent and a free spirit, using her sensuality to get her way at times, but never belonging to any one man any longer than she chooses.
I saw ANATAHAN many years ago and kind of liked it. Seeing it now in the restored Blu-ray, I'm convinced it's a masterpiece. Maybe it helps being older to relate to Sternberg's theme -- the futility of war, conflict, desire, sex, and most other human activities. This theme will never sell tickets or appeal to younger viewers who are still passionately caught up in all of this.
The ending is very moving to me now. The surviving men return to their families in a defeated but still okay Japan, realizing they wasted so much time defending a regime that hadn't even existed for years. Then we see Keiko's pretty but almost expressionless face as she sees the ghosts of the men that killed and died for her. What is she thinking? Does she feel guilty? Or a certain satisfaction over the power she had over them? That's for the viewer to decide.
Realize, if you see this film, it will deny you some of the usual satisfactions we expect from movie stories. But go with it and you will experience an artistic achievement that is unlike any other, a unique contemplation of human conflict that unfolds with a Zen-like calm. It's a fitting summation to Sternberg's strange and beautiful oeuvre.
Some posters here complain about the all-Japanese dialog not being subtitled and the constant narration undercutting suspense and making it hard to get "involved" in the story, as one expects to do with most films. This is perfectly understandable since what Sternberg is doing here is totally original, daring and unexpected.
These distancing tactics are deliberate artistic choices. Sternberg doesn't want us to be caught up in the story. He wants us to cooly observe the characters as the narrator does, the way a biologist might observe animals in a lab. He chooses the most foreign (to Western viewers) milieu, to show the universality of human desire, conflict and violence.
Everything adds to the sense of contemplation and detachment. Sternberg traveled halfway around the world only to shoot the film in a studio! Where he creates a jungle as stylized and surreal as you'd find in a Japanese woodcut, a claustrophobic world that traps his hapless characters. They crawl around like microbes in what resembles a giant brain.
It's as if we the viewers are space aliens being given a dispassionate guided tour of human behavior by the narrator, who speaks in first person as one of the survivors, but we never learn which one.
Having created some of the strangest, most surreal movies ever produced in Hollywood (THE SCARLET EMPRESS, THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN), Sternberg goes even more strange and surreal in this one, although the acting is more naturalistic than usual for him.
His Marlene Dietrich films center around a mysterious woman upon whom men project their desires for sex, love, violence and revenge. Here Keiko is the final mystic Sternberg temptress. Like Concha in THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN, she watches, calmly bemused, as the men fight, kill, and die to possess her. Like all the classic Sternberg heroines, she is a free agent and a free spirit, using her sensuality to get her way at times, but never belonging to any one man any longer than she chooses.
I saw ANATAHAN many years ago and kind of liked it. Seeing it now in the restored Blu-ray, I'm convinced it's a masterpiece. Maybe it helps being older to relate to Sternberg's theme -- the futility of war, conflict, desire, sex, and most other human activities. This theme will never sell tickets or appeal to younger viewers who are still passionately caught up in all of this.
The ending is very moving to me now. The surviving men return to their families in a defeated but still okay Japan, realizing they wasted so much time defending a regime that hadn't even existed for years. Then we see Keiko's pretty but almost expressionless face as she sees the ghosts of the men that killed and died for her. What is she thinking? Does she feel guilty? Or a certain satisfaction over the power she had over them? That's for the viewer to decide.
Realize, if you see this film, it will deny you some of the usual satisfactions we expect from movie stories. But go with it and you will experience an artistic achievement that is unlike any other, a unique contemplation of human conflict that unfolds with a Zen-like calm. It's a fitting summation to Sternberg's strange and beautiful oeuvre.