Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams comes to 4K . . . to illuminate home theater screens with a work of art from the famed director’s personal gallery. The disc’s cover illustration is a painting by Kurosawa, who was then turning 80 years old.
At the twilight of his career, after some episodes of instability and career frustration, Akira Kurosawa hit a high note with the epic costume dramas Kagemusha and Ran. Another few years passed before this movie, a personal project that brings to life a series of the writer-director’s idylls. A definite ‘old man’s movie’, Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams is frequently moralizing and pessimistic, being made by a man who witnessed some of the worst political events of the 20th century.
Perhaps Kurosawa was inspired by Federico Fellini, who lost interest in storytelling and instead turned the last twenty years of his career into an examination of his own personal problems. Kurosawa is at least as interesting as Fellini, and not half as narcissistic. The great Japanese filmmaker’s visualizations blend traditionalism with a refreshingly playful use of special effects, right at the cusp of the incoming computer-generated visual revolution. Able to control most every aspect of his images, Kurosawa’s mastery of cinema is as strong as ever.
Auteurists enjoy nothing better than a psychological profile, and in Dreams Kurosawa provides all the self-examination any psycho-biographer could want. A character in each story is either a direct Kurosawa substitute, referred to in the script as “I,” or an observer who might as well be the director. The stories taken from childhood are steeped in traditional fables, schoolboy punishments, and references to siblings lost at an early age. The first ‘dream’ involves a fantastic wedding and the last a merry funeral. In between come stories about the destruction of the environment and an obsession with war — the conflict from the 1940s and a feared future nuclear war.
Western viewers and perhaps non-scholarly Japanese might need guidance to understand the fables being referenced. Should we assume that accepted symbolism is at play, when (Noh?) dancers restage a wedding procession for foxes, and a grove of fruit trees is represented by a hierarchy of elaborate dolls that compose a royal court?
A strong component of each story are oneiric visual memories — images of scenes viewed from one angle, remembered in one particular way, such as the gate entrance to Kurosawa’s childhood home, or the grove of trees where hides the young “I,” while witnessing the forbidden fox wedding. The visual control becomes even more impressive as Kurosawa’s art directors warp visual space to make live-action settings look like 2-D story illustrations. A perfect matte places a rainbow over a fantastic field of flowers, where “I” will go to beg the foxes for his life. The image suggests that the artist Kurosawa has been struggling for the better part of a century to justify himself to offended family members, or perhaps to nature itself.
Through a telephoto lens, a terraced hillside that once held fruit trees becomes a series of shelves upon which fancy dolls might rest. Even without effects, natural settings are manipulated to create self-enclosed images. Kurosawa simplifies his dream visions into single unforgettable sights — a volcano ringed by fire, the entrance to a mountain tunnel. Pools of water on the floor of a crater reflect a red-sunset sky. That final image of the water reflections at first seems a miracle — as if Kurosawa and his crew and actors waited for the perfect conditions for such a compound image. It’s more likely that some subtle digital manipulation was performed.
Kurosawa approaches the struggle of the artist with a sequence in which his substitute enters a canvas, to find the unhappy Vincent Van Gogh painting in a field. Martin Scorsese plays Van Gogh, a fairly unrewarding idea. But the “I” character then proceeds to walk through several of Van Gogh’s ink drawings and preliminary sketches. This Incredible Shrinking Art Critic comes face to face with giant, thick daubs of paint. Digital matte-work makes the illusions practical, but Kurosawa doesn’t go overboard. The point is made without screaming ‘fabulous effect here.’ We immediately think of the showoff visuals in the elaborate but annoyingly lightweight film blanc What Dreams May Come. By contrast, Kurosawa’s flat images have a coherent thematic poin to make.
Kurosawa’s WW2 remembrance is a J’accuse — like piece about a wandering ex-officer confronted by a battalion of ghost troops, phantoms that want to go home and don’t realize they’re dead. There’s no political angle on this, just the realization that every man of Kurosawa’s generation is figuratively surrounded by the ghosts of hundreds that were sacrificed to warfare. This can only be a tangential “I” character, because Kurosawa didn’t personally serve in the army.
Kurosawa goes all-apocalyptic on us for a couple of episodes about atom war. One shockingly prophetic piece has six atom reactors exploding behind Mt. Fuji, creating a growing furnace of fire that begins to melt the mountain. It’s a dream of Fukushima, 21 years in advance. A panicked expert names the different kinds of deadly elements contained in each color of lethal gas. The population is been driven into the sea, leaving a beach littered with clothing and baby buggies, like the empty oyster shells in Lewis Carroll’s The Walrus and the Carpenter.
A second post-apocalyptic episode on a similar volcanic hill sees a ragged survivor confronted by a horned human-demon, who shows him a place where more demons writhe in agony. All humanity will be transformed into demons, that will live by eating each other. What is this, Jigoku? Not a lot of hope there.
Kurosawa manages to slip a dose of classic Toho fantasy into his dreams. The key to the more fantastic episodes is creative consultant Ishiro Honda, who in the ’50s and ’60s was a top director at Toho, helmin all those elaborate Kaiju and science fiction fantasies. The image of the volcano was surely composited at ILM, but it has the graphic look of the spectacularly successful volcano at the end of Honda’s 1956 Rodan. The giant mutant plants in the post-apocalyptic blackout sketch remind us of the surreal flora of Honda’s scary (and very adult) Matango, still a superior horror tale. If only Kurosawa had been able to collaborate with Honda back then — !
The final dream is a Utopian idyll that shows Kurosawa turning his back on futurism, to endorse traditional, nature-based values as the only hope for mankind. It’s not much help for the next generation, which has no way to follow the ideas, even if it wanted to. The “I” character visits a beautiful, nameless village on a stream lined with water wheels. An old man (Chishu Ryu) lectures him on the right way to do everything and explains why a funeral he’s to attend is a joyous thing. The village has little or no ecological footprint and no use for electricity; everything is natural and perfect. Well, it is a dream. The village also has no sickness, no outside competitors or enemies, no overpopulation and completely cooperative weather. They’re happy in their ignorance and live free of hatred, bigotry, envy or avarice. I don’t find it a very substantive dream, but more of a fairy tale.
The same goes for Kurosawa’s un-filmed episode, originally proposed to be the last. A dream of universal international peace, it couldn’t be made because it required thousands of extras and scenes filmed on multiple continents. It sounds as if the un-filmed episode would have had a theme similar to Wim Wenders’ epic science fiction film from 1991, self-described as ‘a dance around the world.’
I’m sorry, but for me, the main takeaway has always been Marty hollering in his unmistakable Noo Yawk accent, “Da SUN! It comPELS me tuh PAINT!”