Rhapsodie im August

A beautiful and deeply moving work,it deals with a taboo subject which is rarely treated on the screen.The approach is much different from that of Alain Resnais in "Hiroshima mon amour",and the main reason is that the director is Japanese.Far from Marguerite Duras' verbal logorrhea,Kurosawa lets us in the tragedy through children's eyes,and their simple and naive words.These children,who visit the memorial, only know what the history books tell:almost nothing.

One of the movie's main subject is building some kind of bridge between two generations(a bridge over troubled water,because the adults are rather unsympathetic characters).Kurosawa's granny is universal,she 's the embodiment of suffering,forgiveness and wisdom."Blame it on the war" she keeps on repeating during the whole movie.And her hard-earned peace of mind ,she tries to communicate it to her four grandsons.She does want to see his brother ,now dying,who emigrated to Hawai and made his fortune in pineapples, a long time ago,and his family.The children's fathers are mean little bourgeois,only interested in these American relatives' dough and luxury mansion with pools,the mothers hateful silly geese.None of them can understand the grandmother any more.

So if there's some hope to be found,it can only lie in the relationship old/young,skipping a whole generation,with the exception of minor Richard Gere character.The four children and their granny sitting under a blue moonlight when the adults are talking social promotion and money is beautifully filmed.But it will not delude for long.The last pictures are a real metaphor:sure the road to follow for the youngsters is the grandmother's one,which does not forget the past ,but it's a rocky road,edged with chasms .

This film feels like a story the great Akira Kurosawa wanted to tell. Four grandchildren are staying with their aged grandma outside of Nagasaki. She is a survivor of the bomb in 1945, but her husband, a teacher, perished that day. The grandmother's children are in Hawaii visiting a relative and her husband, who is played by Richard Gere in a fine understated performance. Clark (Gere) and his wife have her father living with them, and they claim he is one of Grandma's brothers, but she cannot remember him. The film becomes a mediation on the war, specifically the devastating effect on Nagasaki. In one particularly touching scene everyone gathers at the school where Grandpa perished that day in August. There is a monument there built for the children who dies there that day, a sculpture of mangled monkey bars. The film is slow moving, meditative, but moving in its best moments. While not among Kurosawa's best work (its virtually impossible to stand up to such greatness), this last film of his is a touching tribute to a part of his life (and so many others) that is both easy to forget, but also impossible not to remember. The acting is uniformly very good, especially the four children and Grandma. Recommended.

I am a great fan of Kurosawa and I was so shock how bore this film was when I first saw it in theatre back in the 90s. I know Kurosawa always hide some message in his late movies and, after twenty years, I decided to rent the DVD again to examine the movie in detail. As I got into the movie, I start to understand what Kurosawa want to say. This movie is about how the younger Japanese are abandon their own culture and at the same time,ironically, it is the American, the one who dropped the atomic bomb in Japan,are reviving the Japanese tradition culture(G.Lucus and S. Spielberg are the one who produced the movie Kagamusa). Also, it is about aging as Kurosawa is part of the aging generation. Old people are being seen by young people as weak, illusions, and hopeless out of time and a burden, but when crisis came,(the storm in the movie) old people would show a trendous strength to protect the young one as the old lady in the movie standing up to the storm; it reflected that even Kurosawa, an old man, still could produces such thoughtful movie. I believe Kurosawa made this movie only for those who understand him and ,to me, this is one of his best even thought I love samurai movies.

Akira Kurosawa is one of my very favorite filmmakers. If you search through my reviews, I have written about a few, The Seven Samurai, High and Low, Kagemusha, and Dreams. I have seen many more, Rashomon, Ikiru (my personal favorite), Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Dersu Uzala, and Ran. I have only disliked one, High and Low, but not one of his films failed to amaze me in some way or other. My initial opinion, after seeing Rashomon, The Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Ran and Kagemusha was that he was an amazing stylist whose films felt slightly impersonal to me. I strongly disagree with that opinion now (I expressed it in my review to Kagemusha, which I'm surprised hasn't resulted in tons of hate mail).

I have just finished watching Kurosawa's second to last film, Rhapsody in August. It is not highly regarded, usually dismissed as a very minor work in a master's portfolio. This I also discovered about my second favorite of his films, Dreams. Well, as far as my opinion, I think people were dead wrong about both of these films.

Rhapsody in August is not a stylistic masterpiece like The Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, or Ran. Instead, only second to Ikiru, it is Kurosawa's most humanistic film. I have only seen one film by him (although I've read a lot about him), but I would compare it more to Yasujiro Ozu's work.

This film has a plethora of themes, ranging from the effect of the H-Bomb on both the Japanese and the Americans, the generation gaps between the three generations present (the matriarch of the family feels separate from her middle-aged children, but she relates well to her grandchildren who are interested in their country's sorrowful history), and the effect of American culture on the Japanese of the present generation. It is quite a handful, but everything is handled so subtly that some viewers who don't pick up on it all may easily grow uninterested. In some ways, the film feels very didactic (in a good way). I can imagine this film being showed to younger children, since the four grandchildren, at least at the beginning, are learning about the history of the bomb and Nagazaki and their grandfather's death.

The only weak point of the film is probably the very end, which is difficult to understand. I have a feeling that there was some cross-cultural barrier preventing my understanding of it, so if anyone does get it, please contact me. Anyway, as I perceived it, the film ended kind of randomly. But still, what has come before is too good to get too upset by the lack of closure. It deserves a 10/10.

When I saw this movie, I remembered Louis-Ferdinand Celine's book, "Journey to the End of the Night", a anti-war book. Reading reviews about the movie, listening to what people in the US had to say, seeing the reaction of the American media to this movie, I was sad, simply sad. This movie is not about Japan, it's not about America, it could have been anywhere a war had happened.

This movie is a poem against war and the scars it leaves forever deep in the mind of the people who suffered those wars. Those who didn't suffer a war are lucky, and shouldn't be blamed for being this lucky, but they should see movies like this to understand what war is about. The world is never better after war. The first ones to agree to settle things through warfare are the ones who didn't suffer war. There are no winners in a war, just remember.

I'm sorry that all those who felt attacked in their pride as Americans are missing the point of this movie. If your father or your grandfather, or your friend has been to war, just listen to them.

The performance of the grandmother will make you forget you're watching a movie! It is filmed simply and un-pretentiously, though is a very emotional film.

Enjoy.

PS: Oh and I'm not Japanese...