going too far
by
Douglas Messerli
Akira
Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, Fumio Hayasaka, Hideo Oguni (screenplay), Akira
Kurosawa (director) 生きものの記録 (Ikimono no kiroku) (I Live in Fear) / 1955
In
many respects Akira Kurosawa’s Ikimono no
kiroku (I Live in Fear) is his
most Japanese film, simply because it recounts the horrific fear that most
Japanese must have suffered during the Cold War of the 1950s, particularly
after being the homeland of the only 2 major atomic bombings on ordinary
citizens in history. Every character in this complex work does, indeed, have
fears of nuclear annihilation (as did numerous citizens around the world; as a
child I was one of them).
Yet foundry owner Kiichi Nakajima (the
always wonderful Toshiro Mifune) has, as most of his family perceives, gone a
bit to far, first attempting to build a nuclear bunker at considerable expense
in the south of Japan, but upon discovering information that if there was
another bomb the residue would probably move from the north to the south,
becomes determined to move his very large and urban family to a large
plantation in Brazil.
Almost from the beginning of the film, as
the family has gathered in a domestic court to air their grievances—Nakajima’s
wife has flinchingly filed, with the help of her sons and daughters, a petition
to that court to declare her husband mentally incompetent—and a local dentist,
Dr. Harada (Takashi Shimura) has been asked to join two other judges in hearing
their case.
It is clearly a highly contentious one,
with family members exciting the hearing room to each utter their anger and pronouncements,
while inside sits the resolute and stubborn father, flapping his fan endlessly
in torture and anger, convinced that is family— including his immediate children
and those he has fathered from an illicit relationship, all of whom we
gradually come to perceive as a fictious and ungrateful lot, desperate to keep
up their own financial support proffered them from this terrified industrialist.
If at first, we might certainly side with
the family members, who perceive their father’s concerns, despite their own
private fears, as “going too far” and as do two of the judges, through the
careful and deep-thinking Dr. Harada we begin to realize just how deeply
embedded are his fears in the society at large. Might not everyone, to a
certain degree, silently and less explosively, be suffering the same fears? Even
Harada’s son admits to such inclinations, but what can one do, he argues.
"Everybody has to die,"
Nakajima counters, "but I won't be murdered."
The careful and caring Harada, in the
end, is done in by the angry and impetuous businessman, who attempts to quickly
work around the family and their financial restraints which the court
eventually applies, by attempting to buy up property in Brazil and force his
family to join him. But, his anger, in the end, does him in, and he is left
simply as an old man in a kind of fever, ready to die before his time. Even
Harada’s attempts to meet and talk with him have been to no avail. The fear, in
which he lives, dominates everything else.
He is not even willing to discuss how this
deathly “anxiety,” which poet W. H. Auden described a problem of the decade in
his phrase “The Age of Anxiety,” has come about. Had he witnessed or imagined
the Hiroshima or Nagasaki attacks? Or had he simply worried so much about his
own country’s history that, despite his great financial success—working as, strangely
enough, a kind of Hephaestus, a forger of war in the underground—he has become
obsessed with nuclear destruction? If his family members are petty and selfish,
so too has he himself been in his various affairs and business activities. Are
his feelings of absolute terror a result of his own terrorizing of others, his
absolute control over his sons and daughters?
In the end, I realized this film was far
more Western and international in its subjects than merely representing a
post-war Japanese statement of angst. It reminded me more than any other film
of Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterful The
Sacrifice, a movie wherein another family leader, terrifyingly fearful of nuclear
war, is equally committed to saving his family and his society from the
inevitable, in this case by burning down the house which he and his contentious
family so loved. Nakajima also burns down his own “house,” so to speak, in
destroying his factory, leaving not only his family but his loyal employees
without any possible means of survival.
Perhaps in the process his has destroyed
his own past connections with the capitalism that made nuclear warfare
possible, or perhaps, just as in Tarkovsky’s films, it simply represents those acts
of a kind of madness, of a man who has “gone too far” in his own thinking to
retreat into rationality, the possibility of which composer Fumio Hayasaka (who
died shortly after composing the music for this film, and a man who created
some of the greatest of movie music through the years) eerily conveys through
his combination of jazz music and Theremin.
Los Angeles, September
14, 2018
Beautiful movie. Love the blocking and variety of character personalities.
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