Aleksandr Sokurov’s still, breathless film about Emperor Hirohito is a portrait in grey smoke and vague, delicate sounds. From inside the Emperor’s colorless laboratory of a palace, the distant cries of poverty and displacement and the low rumble of mechanized destruction cannot be heard above the tick and whirr of recording devices, preserving the movements and observations of the great men of history.
Of course, Sokurov plays this situation for its irony, casting a curious, antic Issey Ogata as the cloistered, loopy leader of Japan, who makes fishy faces and ponders scrapbook images of Marlene Dietrich like a teenager in love. Furtive and boyish, Ogata’s Hirohito becomes downright pitiable as the Emperor must concede his country’s defeat, his decorum and pageantry pitted against the red-meat practicality of MacArthur. But this is nothing compared to his final transition from Emperor to simple human: after a lifetime of deification as the rising sun of his land, this concession comes hardest of all.
The Sun plays at New York City’s Film Forum through Tuesday, December 1.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Lorber Films 35mm Print
18 Nov 2009 12:02 AM | Submit Comment
