Sous les drapeaux, l'enfer

If you are thinking of watching this, you need to know what your are getting into first. This is a violent movie, in the extreme.

I do not ordinarily watch violent movies. But I am glad I watched this one, even though I had to turn away a few times. The subject matter is about violence, and the director pulls no punches.

It is so easy to romanticize war, either in victory or defeat. This movie clearly has a message for the Japanese people about WWII that the director intends them never to forget. That it was received so well, speaks well of the Japanese people's honesty. And it has a message for her Asian neighbors who suffered at the hands of Japanese soldiers, that perhaps hate is no longer appropriate.

Viewing it as an American, I was struck by how different the image is from that of the well-disciplined soldier presented almost as a polite stereotype in Hollywood movies. An American director could not have gotten away with such a movie. However, I can't help wondering if this is perhaps not exactly a representative view of what Japanese soldiers went through.

The movie is told very effectively through its plot, following the inquiries of the war widow into the death of her husband. As the truth comes out, it hits you in the gut much as it would have hit this widow.

At the same time, the director apparently did not intend for this film to be viewed too narrowly as an antiwar movie. It is not just about war, and it is not just about Japanese soldiers, it is about human beings, and what any of us might do in similar circumstances.

This film puts most war movies to shame. Here is a cinematically beautiful yet shockingly realistic depiction of what war is like. The betrayal of humanity involved on numerous levels is juxtaposed with the individual soldier's will to survive and with one widow's need to know the hidden truth about how her husband died. Her journey of naivete to knowledge and understanding is the central character arc that traverses through the accounts of several veterans from her husband's unit. The gorgeous photography features shot after shot of beautiful landscape that serves as a kind of silent and solitary witness to the mayhem.

Nowhere do you see the cloying sentimentality and heroism that stink up so many war films. I give it the highest rating.

Director Fukasaku is best known for his cult classic Battle Royale, as well as numerous yakuza flicks from the '70s. Under the Flag of the Rising Sun is really the film he should best be known for. He produced it independently, and it's easily his most prestigious and all-around exceptional film. It's a WWII movie, made from the perspective of a quarter century later. Sachiko Hidari stars as a war widow in 1971 who is still trying to get benefits from the government, as well as restore her husband's honor. He was supposedly executed in the waning days of the war, but any further information has disappeared. To find the truth, she begins searching for veterans who may have known her husband. She interviews several witnesses who give her a conflicting story of her husband, but a pretty vivid picture of what it might have been like to be a soldier fighting in the New Guinea front. The film isn't exploitative, but it can be explicitly violent (most of the flashbacks are in black and white up until the violence starts - Fukasaku does not want the audience to be separate from that). Under the Flag of the Rising Sun is one of the most unflinching of all the great Japanese WWII films. You really feel the pain that still exists in the early '70s. The sequences with the war veteran teacher, watching over his students who have grown up after the war and are completely innocent of it, are especially gut-wrenching. I also loved the performance of Noboru Mitani, best known for playing the irresponsible homeless father in Kurosawa's Dodeskaden, who plays a veteran with a dark secret.

This is about a woman's quest to find out the truth about her husband Togashi's WWII execution over twenty years after the fact. After spending those twenty years attempting to get answers from bureaucrats, she finally finds some who have some empathy and give her a list of names of people that served with him. She travels to see these people and we see what kind of lives the soldiers returned to. First there's her encounter with a man who lives in what appears to be a mountain of garbage. He tells her that her husband was a great man, a hero who he owes his life to. This man tells her that Togashi wasn't executed at all, that he had to have died in battle. He is unwilling to tell the authorities this story, explaining that he doesn't like to be around people and he hasn't been to a city in years.

Naturally she isn't satisfied, part of the reason she wants to find out about her husband's death is to have his name cleared so he'll get the same recognition as other people who died in the war. The next man, a comedic actor who stars in farces about the war, tells her Togashi was executed for stealing a potato from a farmer. The film continues on this way as Togashi's wife gets a different story from every man she encounters. Her journey leads her to people of various social standings including a blind man with an adulterous waitress for a wife, a leftist professor, and a retired public official. Each encounter brings her nearer the truth and gives her a greater understanding of the war experience. She begins to see how terrible it was for all involved and she begins to realize that nobody ever really recovers from it; in other words, a government's recognition of the death of a person it forced to go to war and essentially killed is completely worthless, especially when the government literally executes that person.

Fukasaku's film is well plotted and it has a precisely executed theme. Further, the visuals are often impressively delivered. The editing is top notch, particularly in the scenes that suggest the main character's interior state. There's also some impressively handled "new wave" experimental techniques such as still frames and color filters. This film's style called to mind the work of more well known Japanese film-makers of the era such as Nagisa Oshima and Shohei Imamura while still remaining an original, personal work for Fukasaku.

If Japanese war films are snubbed in the West, that's not done on any political grounds. The Japanese are not only the first to condemn the rigid militarism that brought them to the brink of complete destruction following WWII but the only ones to offer that condemnation against Emperor and Generals in such a scathing manner. If you won't find films like this or THE BATTLE OF OKINAWA mentioned in the same lists as their Vietnam-war American counterparts like APOCALYPSE NOW, it has to do with the same cultural reasons that keep Japanese (or French and Italian) crime films in the shadow while Scorsese, Tarantino and their cohorts reap all the glory.

And even when the spotlight falls on the individual, the lowly Japanese soldier haphazardly trained in a few weeks time and sent with meager provisions to conquer New Guinea, the Philippines, or Indonesia in the name of the 'Motherland', the focus is not on a heroic celebration of courage and valor because these men where not heroes and what courage they showed in the face of death was instilled in them by the fear of worse things like malaria and malnutrition or even worse, the fear of their superiors executing them for cowardice, but on grim endurance beyond all hope and glory with nothing else to look forward to but returning home to a wartorn devastated country. The chaos squalor and misery of postwar Japan Kinji Fukasaku knows firsthand. It's the place and time he grew up in and the memory of that misery would resurface regularly in his films as a bleak backdrop to the yakuza films through which he became known and for which he never received the acclaim he deserved.

This is the greatest success of UNDER THE FLAG OF THE RISING SUN. Not the narrative maze of the script carrying echoes of RASHOMON and even CITIZEN KANE that has the wife of an executed soldier trying to piece together the life and death of her husband in New Guinea through the memories of his surviving comrades and superiors. It's the hopelessness and savagery of men trying to survive like beasts in the jungle, this relived in a booming 1960's modern Japan by the survivors in the form of flashbacks, that sets apart films like this and Kon Ichikawa's FIRES IN THE PLAIN from their American counterparts. Major battle scenes and historic events are in the background, presented in Fukasaku's trademark quick montages using stock photos. It's the day-to-day tragic struggle for survival for which there is no glory to be had that pucks the real punch and it's enough of a punch to make you ignore the problematic script or poor handling of exposition. In the end, one of the survivors living in a garbage-strewn shantytown outside of Tokyo, bemoans not the misery and destruction of postwar Japan but its rapid economic growth that has no room for scarred veterans like him. Vietnam veterans of 30 years later would relate.