Sous les drapeaux, l'enfer

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.

Searing indictment of war and the individuals discredited in its aftermath. Directed by the masterful Kinji Fukasaku, it is a harsh, bleak work that uses monochrome flashbacks with occasional explosions of color, war photographs, and grim narration to tell a terrible tale.

Sachiko Hidari, a war widow, has spent twenty-six years searching for the truth about her husband's death. Was he executed? Was he a deserter? Was he a hero? As the government adheres to an official, flawed version of events, the stubborn woman seeks her own answers by speaking to the men who served with her husband. The stories told by these damaged soldiers comprise the bulk of the movie and accounts are complicated by each man's "truth".

Exceptionally well acted and directed with a savage determination to depict the insanity of war in its rawest state, this is surely one of Fukasaku's greatest achievements and certainly one of the most honest portraits of homosapien behavior ever branded to celluloid.

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.

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.

I'm a fan of Fukasaku's gritty doomed gangster movies, and have come to expect a harrowing exposition of human frailty and self destruction, usually at a very personal level. However, this movie plays out on a much grander scale as it sets about exploring the nature of nationalism, militarism, obedience, subjective reality, repressed memory, and guilt. I'm hard pressed to think of a western movie that digs so deeply into the despair of war widows, or examines their feelings in such minute detail. Technically it's almost a documentary, but personalised by the heroine's relentless quest for the truth.

Far from being a glorious affair full of grand heroism and precision munitions, war is a filthy business conducted at the sharp end by people who have little or nothing to gain by it. At the blunt end, the politicians and generals eat well and live a life of whimsical luxury while their forces starve and die brutally in foul conditions. Odd that so few filmmakers choose to explore the madness that sends millions to their death for overweening greed, imperial insanity, or even a bare faced lie. The Blue Max, Dr. Strangelove, and Oh What a Lovely War, amongst others, have examined the glib lunacy inherent in the equation, but Fukasaku's movie is all the more poignant for its protagonist's middle aged ordinariness.

If someone tells you that Battle Royale is Fukasaku's finest hour, just ask them if they've seen this movie. It's not "easy" to watch, but it's educational and moving. Try it with rice instead of popcorn.