After taking a detour into Spaghetti Western territory, with the Dollars Trilogy, I returned to Kurosawa's Sanjuro, sequel to Yojimbo, which Sergio Leone plagiarized for A Fistful of Dollars.  I enjoyed Sanjuro immensely (as I enjoyed Leone's two sequels to A Fistful of Dollars, A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly).  In fact, I liked Sanjuro better than Yojimbo, I have to say, mainly on account of a slightly more streamlined plot that gave me more time to appreciate Toshiro Mifune scratching himself, stroking his chin, and pulling faces. 

From there I jumped ahead to 1990's Dreams.  I saw it when it came out, but hadn't seen it since.  It was actually my first Kurosawa film, which probably explains why I didn't see another one for seventeen years.  And watching it again, I was as ultimately unimpressed as I had been all those years ago.  And this is after recognizing Kurosawa's genius on display in films like Rashomon, The Seven Samurai, and Donzoko.  Even his later wide-angle epics, Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985) were infused with a passionate humanity, and the singular sensibility that connected them to earlier works, deepening and enriching his oeuvre. 

In this context, Dreams is a poignant failure.  It is a collection of vignettes, not all as dreamlike as the title suggests, and I got the feeling that there were two projects here that got smooshed into one — the first, a collection of dreams: "The Foxes' Wedding," "The Blizzard," "The Tunnel," all of which were magical and dreamlike, but which get successively more didactic. 

The second film here is a kind of apocalyptic picaresque, with an irritating tourist visiting various stations of the cross on his way to ecological awareness.  These vignettes are universally bad — poorly scripted, preachy and pedantic, and clumsily staged.  The desperation to get a message across is palpable, but ultimately unpersuasive.

I remembered only one ("Crows") from watching the movie before, and that one because it starred Martin Scorsese as Vincent van Gogh.  There is so much so wrong with this scenario it's futile to even get into it.  The one line that resonates in this piece comes when the irritating Japanese tourist, who has been sucked into one of van Gogh's pictures while viewing it in a museum, asks Mr. van Gogh why he paints, and van Gogh snaps: "it's so difficult to hold it inside!"  Ah, but sometimes we must. 

"Mt. Fuji in Red," the vignette that follows, is a nuclear apocalypse scenario that would have benefited immeasurably from a Godzilla cameo.  The vignette ends on a deserted beach, with a typical Japanese family (our tourist at the head) and a middle-aged man in a business suit.  The rest of Japan has jumped into the sea.  As the family runs back and forth and back and forth like Hamsters in a cage on what must have been a sound stage the size of a water closet, whining about how "they told us nuclear power was safe!" the man in the suit reveals that he is the "they" in question.  He says he regrets the error.

"The Weeping Demon" is next, and is set in a post-nuclear apocalyptic landscape of mud and giant mutant dandelions.  The sets, again, are comically low-budget, but the high seriousness of the theme does not allow us to enjoy them all that much.  Here the tourist is treated as Dante with the Weeping Demon as his Virgil, offering him a little tour of Hell.  By now, the tourist is a complete marshmallow.  Slackjawed and stumbling through the film asking stupid questions and getting stupid answers, he seems meant to convey humanity's helplessness, but he more poignantly conveys Kurosawa's.

The movie comes to a merciful end with "The Village of the Water Mill," which revisits themes touched upon by Kurosawa over his long career (in 1975's infinitely more enjoyable, though no less obvious Dersu Uzala, for example).  But again, that tourist!  Enough with the frakin tourist!  With his cute little Hello Kitty backpack and goofy little Gilligan hat! I vote for Godzilla.

This time "I" comes upon an old man in a little village, who commences preaching to him about the evils of modern technology.  I agreed with everything the old man said, but it was all pretty much self-evident.  Kurosawa breaks the cardinal rule of good storytelling: "show, don't tell."  Consequently, most of the film is flat. 

I got the feeling watching Dreams that the director was overwhelmed, and tired.  There was no snark left in him.  A little righteous anger, but not even a lot of that. Kurosawa was never a snarky director, anyway.  His movies are dated by their unrelenting sincerity.  Distilled to his essence, Kurosawa is a sincere sentimentalist.  And if you need proof, have a look at his final effort: Madadayo. 


Madadayo's greatest achievement is that almost a third of the film is a serious examination of the utter desolation a missing cat causes its elderly protagonist.  I searched, as most viewers under the age of eighty are likely to, for a moment of comic relief, a glimmer of irony even, but in vain.  And a lot of viewers under eighty have trashed the film for taking this plot point to the absolute outer limits. 

And admittedly, it's not a movie that makes a lot of sense on its own.  Yes, the plot is easy enough to follow.  Nothing really happens — it's basically two big drunken banquets with time out between for the lost cat.  But why?  Like Dreams, what meaning is in it derives from its place in its deeply humanistic director's oeuvre. 

Today's viewers want a way out of taking the missing cat seriously.  Like the banquets, the thing just goes on and on, with no relief.  Beyond tedious, to the brink of appalling, really, like a former student of the aging Professor Uchida reciting every stop on a commuter rail line during the first banquet scene, because he has nothing better to offer in tribute to his beloved sensei.  (If anything the movie is a good introduction to that peculiarly Japanese sensibility and sense of humor.)

But the cat is even harder to take.  Here we have a tale that takes place in post-World War II Japan, in the smoldering ashes of atomic annihilation, and the main character is crying over a lost cat.  It's not about the contrast, either — the war is only obliquely referenced throughout the film — it's really just about the missing cat.  Which is not to say that the revelation the missing cat promises is fulfilled.  The whole thing's a little sketchy, if you want to know the truth.  Nothing leads inexorably to the cat as the core revelation of the picture. 

But when you think about it, there's something incredibly ballsy in it. And I might venture (and I may sound like a Kurosawa snob for it, but...) if you can't understand what Kurosawa is getting at with the missing cat, you've failed to grasp the strain that runs through Kurosawa's whole body of work.  Because the sheer earnestness, the unmitigated humanity with which so outlandishly banal a story is approached is pure Kurosawa. 

In a lesser artist's hands, there would be a third party rolling his eyes or offering sarcastic asides.  The director would find some way to wink at us, to let us know that he knew how ridiculous it is to take a missing cat so seriously.  Kurosawa doesn't give us this out.  We have no choice but to accept the protagonist's pain qua pain.  However ridiculous to us, whatever its source, it's real. 

That's no small feat.  But it's not all that much fun, either.  Which is why this film is at least as tedious as it is revelatory.  But I felt I owed it to Kurosawa-sensei to attend his last lesson.  And I'm glad I did, though I wouldn't recommend it to a novice.  This one is for advanced disciples only.