The Three Bandits of The Hidden Fortress

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress.

You know the movie very well, of course. I’ve only seen it three or four times. Every time I remember that the beginning is slow and there’s a lot of the two Fools who are the heroes, before the real story gets going. And every time when I watch, the beginning with the two Fools before the real story gets going seems to take longer.

I guess you have to find the Fools’ antics funny to enjoy them. The odd thing is that I do find them funny, once they are contrasted with the heroic General and brave, fiery Princess. But on their own, the Fools don’t amuse me at all. Could it be I’m missing a lot by not knowing Japanese? Maybe their accents, the words they use, are funnier than the bare-bones subtitles.

Anyway, it’s 45 minutes before we meet the Princess for real. And it’s an hour before the General, Princess, and Fools set out on their mission. I count that as the end of Act I. A whole hour for Act I! Too long for me!

The story: War has broken out between the Akizuki and Yamana clans. The Hayakawa clan stays out of the war but has agreed to shelter the survivors of the losing Akizukis – if they can cross the border.

But we really begin with the two Fools. They are peasants who sold all their goods to buy a couple weapons and join the war, in the hope of gaining riches. Didn’t work out that way: arriving late to battle, they were pressed into service stripping corpses. Now in rags, they are trudging back to Hayakawa where they’re from, and quarreling every step of the way, blaming each other for the mess they’re in.

They find the Yamana-Hayakawa border closed and patrolled by Yamana soldiers watching lest any last Akizukis escape. Then the Fools get picked up by Yamana troops and are thrown in with other captives digging out the foundations of Akizuki castle, searching for the rumored 200 gold pieces that formed the basis of Akizuki wealth.

The fools manage to get away in the confusion following a slave revolt, and wander the wild hinterlands, hungry, stealing what they can, at the end of their rope. Then they find some sticks with gold pieces hidden in them.

Searching for more, the Fools run into a fierce bandit (Toshiro Mifune) who says he knows where the rest of the gold is. And he has a wild spitfire of a girl wandering around too, in the Hidden Fortress abandoned by the Akizukis, which was used at one time as a spy post on Yamana lands.

But in fact the bandit is the Akizuki general Rokurota, and the girl is the Akizuki Princess Yuki, with a high price on her head. They are holed up here unsure what to do. And the General would have killed the Fools, only when he asks them their plans, they babble out some nonsense about the only way to get to Hayakawa is by going into Yamana first. This appeals to the General, and so he spares them and even adopts their plan.

So (at last, after a whole hour!) they set forth: the General, the Princess, two Fools and three horses weighted down with billets of wood concealing the Akizuki gold. They enter Yamana territory, but news of their movements are always just behind them. Along the way they sell the horses, buy a enslaved Akizuki captive and a cart, do battle with Yamana generals, burn all the wood in a fire festival, dig up the gold from the ashes come dawn, and flee for their lives over wild mountains on the Hayakawa marches. But it’s all in vain. The two Fools make up their minds to betray the Princess, but they fail even in this – Princess and General are already captured. Totally defeated but still with their lives, the Fools trudge on into Hayakawa to make their way home.

Behind them the general Rokurota defeated in a duel comes to identify the General and the Princess. But he has been beaten savagely and scarred for having lost the duel, and his old honorable friendship with Rokurota has soured in the rival general’s heart. Rokurota apologizes to the Princess, but Yuki thanks the General for the best time of her life, and sings the song from the Fire Festival on rising above attachment to life.

Come the morning, they set out from the frontier for Yamana castle. But at the last moment the Yamana general, remembering the song, battles his own men, sets the General and Princess free, and sends them into Hayakawa, with the horses laden with gold ahead of them. Then he leaps on a horse and follows.

Far ahead, the two Fools trudge along. Once again they are swearing friendship – until the horses with the gold come along. Then they start bickering over who gets what, until some Hayakawa troops ride up an arrest them.

In the final scenes, the Fools meet again their traveling companions, now transformed in courtly dress and battle armor. General Rokurota offers the Fools two gold pieces in thanks for their services, and the Fools leave Hayakawa castle, finally (it would seem) having learned their lesson, and no longer squabbling over gold.

This was a hard project to make work. It seems as though Kurosawa is really telling the Fools’ story, but the heroic General and brave Princess are too interesting, and as soon as they appear, the story shifts to them. I could say Kurosawa was making more of a kids’ story, and the Fools give the kids somebody to look down on and laugh at. But it goes deeper.

The opening scenes tell us what war is like for most of the people who fight it. Dirty, destructive, and inglorious. When the General and Princess hijack the story, we get glimpses into what war is like for the elite: glorious, adventurous, honorable. The point then is clear: the samurai elite can wage glorious war, on an individual basis, but as soon as it gets into clans and states, then inevitably the peasants are drawn in, and war is no longer so nice. The idea that a peasant can gain from war is the ultimate folly.

The opening reminds me a little of Yoshikawa’s Musashi which also opens with the hero, a peasant gone off to fight in war, waking up in the piles of dead, learning that his side has lost the war. He also went to war with a buddy from his home village, and the two end up following very different paths from the corpse-field. There is also Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu monogatari about two peasants who go to war for gain, which came out five years before The Hidden Fortress.

Does anyone remember the folly of war at movie’s end after seeing the General strike down his foes, and the heroic escape at the end? Or do we instead see the dirt and ugliness of the beginning as the Fools’ own fault, and nothing inherent in war at all? Intellectually I can say that war is wrong here, but I can’t help but get excited when I see the horses galloping and hear the grandiose martial music that is General Rokurota’s theme.

(10 April 2009)

Nobody Knows (Dare mo shiranai)

Hi aki,

Tonight we watched Nobody Knows a 2004 movie directed by Hirokazu Koreeda. Original title comes up at imdb.com as Dare mo shiranai.

Very effective, though long, film. I think it’s too long, but the length works both to make me meditate on what’s unfolding, as well as to make the process seem endless.

A mom who’s a bit weak, leaves her four kids alone in the apartment, and goes off with her boyfriend. The eldest child, Akira, is only 12, but he has to take care of the others. Because the mom also told the landlord it was just her and Akira, none of the kids can go to school or even leave the apartment. Months after mom is gone, though, they all start going out. They need to; The gas and electricity and water have all been turned off.

Finally the youngest, little Yuki, dies in an accident. Akira and Saki, a neighborhood girl, take the body to haneda and bury it there. Life goes on for the survivors. The conclusion to the story would naturally be the discovery by the authorities, charges against the mother, the kids in foster or group homes or whatever they do to such kids in Japan, and finally getting into school and some sort of future. But that conclusion is withheld from us. This is less satisfying but more powerful.

The director shoots in a documentary style, and gets good performances from the kids. They are practically the whole cast. The camera is almost always static, and almost every transition is a straight cut; The only expressionistic scenes involve dead Yuki, first on her birthday when she makes Akira take her to the train station to greet mom – who doesn’t show up of course – and for awhile Akira and Yuki stand below the monorail and he promises her one day he’ll take her to see the airplanes; then near the end as Akira has a fantasy or memory of walking with Yuki down the street, and she’s still alive. (Supposedly Koreeda oroginally planned to end with a fantasy of the whole family, mom and dad and all four kids, united in a sort of heaven, or at least happy household).

Lots of the film is shot and cut in a doc style with closeups, and cutaways, and offhand compositions. These telling details convey a lot and build, taking some pressure off the kids to perform. Every effort is made to keep away from big emotions, everything is lowkey, normal, everyday. In part this makes it so real, so haunting, so believable.

Do you remember the true case this was based on? I remember something like it in the news, but it was only a few years ago, and one of the comments on imdb.com said that Koreeda worked on the screenplay for 15 years – that would push back the incident to late 1980s. Or were there more than one such incident in Japan?

Of course it’s hard to talk about such a movie without talking about the wider social implications of the story – how could mom do this, how could the kids live without being detected, what kind of a world do we live in? but I’m only talking about the movie.

(27 March 2009)

PS — to read Aki's translation of this post in Japanese, click here.

Late Summer

Hi Aki,

Tonight: Late Summer, Ozu’s next-to-last movie. Man the colors were bright! They had a pristine print. All the compositions were good, almost all of them were good enough to be paintings.

Again Chishu Ryu was in small part. In fact it was only a cameo, although he delivers a philosophical tagline that sums up what could be the message of the film.

The photography really struck me. I don’t recall so many deep shots in other Ozu films. Lots of halls like tunnels, lots of vanishing lines. Did I just miss this in his other films? Is this a new DP? Hmm.

The last images of the film are striking. Chishu Ryu could have played the lead – the father of the family who was always playing around, and goes off to see his mistress and dies at her house - I wonder if Ozu didn’t want to ‘spoil’ Ryu’s persona having him play the part, or if he just thought he was wrong for it, or if he was interested in mixing up his usual cast. Setsuko Hara is in it, playing the sister of the lovely young actress who played her daughter in Late Autumn, or the last Ozu I saw; these titles drive me nuts.

Anyway, after the funeral of the father, a couple of bystanders, fishing in a nearby stream (a woman and Ryu) comment on life and the dead: ‘If he was old, then it was time, but it would be tragedy if a young person died,’ says the woman. Then Ryu gives the sermon, and they go back to fishing. Then we see three shots of headstones, with big black crows on them, pecking at the stones. Disturbing, not Ozu-like at all.

I wonder if he was feeling like he was going to die soon. Maybe he had been sick. Don’t know.

It’s amazing how he juggled these family dramas, always the same story, with little wrinkles.

One sequence that struck me as really good writing and direction: the youngest sister works at a place, and one of the co-workers is being sent to Sapporo (from Osaka where the movie takes place). So they have a farewell get-together, and finally she and the young man are the last ones to leave, sitting at the train station. Well, the two scenes before this, the office setting up the party, the girl gives a look – you suspect her feelings for whoever is going are rather deep. Then at the party, everybody has a line – except her. And when they are singing, to end the scene, she stumbles over the line, and starts again.

I thought it was interesting as a way to treat the major actor in the scene, to give her no lines of dialogue. Usually actors want the lines, and the writer tries to come up with something clever, some way for her to say goodbye to the guy while revealing other things. Instead it’s done opposite.

But then Ozu does give us the station scene, where the guy just keeps saying, ‘What a great party! I’m going to miss you guys!’

At the movie’s end, the girl decides not to accept the proposal by the guy her family has set her up with. Instead she is going to go to Sapporo. And I don’t know if she means to be the guy’s mistress, or if she plans to marry him. But big sis Setsuko Hara says that’s the right decision, so that must mean marriage, right? Or will she just take a transfer and work in the same office, and maybe never marry?

(23 january 2009)

Equinox Flower

Hi, Aki,

Tonight we watched autumn equinox by Ozu. The funny thing about this movie is that I’m still not sure whether he meant it as a comedy, social commentary, or drama. Unfortunately, I had a terrible headache when I watched it – this might explain some of my confusion.

The story involves the usual terrain that Ozu moved through in his later movies: conflict between generations, and arranging for a daughter’s marriage and departure. The beginning sets up Papa as a man who understands the drawbacks of arranged marriages as well as the yearning of young love. Unhappily, Papa seems to forget all his well-meaning understanding when it comes to his own daughter and her fate. He is seeking suitable candidates for her hand without consulting her, as was the traditional approach his parents used when he got married. Meanwhile – though he doesn’t know it yet – his daughter has her heart set on a young man, and yet she refuses to be drawn out by Papa when he asks her if she is interested in any young man.

The two butt heads after the girl’s boyfriend shows up unexpectedly in Papa’s office and without warning or the use of the customary intermediary asks for her hand. Papa is nonplussed and says he’ll have to think about it. Once he gets home he angrily confronts his daughter who, instead of sweet talking him, simply declares that she intends to marry the young man whether her father and mother like it or not. This backs Papa into a corner, and he tells the girl she’s not allowed to leave the house and that he definitely opposes the marriage.

Two subplots bring Papa into considering his own situation through other people’s stories. One of his old middle school friends has lost his own daughter in exactly the same way – the girl has defied him, he has forbidden her marriage, and she has abandoned him to take up with her boyfriend (although it’s not clear whether the girl is married or not). There is also the rather silly proprietress of a country Inn whose daughter is determined to select her own husband, and appeals to family friend Papa for support against her mother’s choice of marriage candidates. Of course, in both these situations, Papa is most reasonable and flexible and ends up giving advice that contradicts his behavior in his own family situation.

In the end however Papa is maneuvered and manipulated into not only allowing the marriage of his daughter to go forward, but also attending the ceremony and finally going to visit his daughter and her new husband in Osaka to reassure them that he wishes them only the best.

What struck me in considering this movie was how rich a study Ozu is for all prospective screen writers and filmmakers. For production students, his absolute clarity and attention to composition is amazing. For screenwriters, his approach is to build up by accretion the general understanding and emotional position of his audience. In Hollywood movies, character is announced their plans and proceed to try to implement them. In this movie, the first third or half of the film unspools before we learn about the daughter’s boyfriend. It feels a bit random and meandering compared to Hollywood movies, and the audience has to be more tuned in to nuance and subtlety and remember everyone and everything that is going on in order to fully enjoy and comprehend the story. Each scene is a small fragment which makes us understand something and feel something, and the total effect of all these fragments allows us to feel only one way about the situation by the time the movie ends.

An Ozu movie is like a jigsaw puzzle. In a Hollywood movie, each scene arises from the previous scene and leads into the subsequent film (or it should). Ozu's scenes connect to three or four other scenes, and the mosaic thus built up is only appreciated when you can hold all the scenes in your head – or rather in your heart.

Ozu and his screenwriter would come up with a long list of scenes and fragments of scenes having to do with the basic situation – in this case, they would be three lists – one for each of the two subplots and the main story line. The fragments would be arranged and rearranged into the order that made emotional sense, by which I mean an order that would position us viewers into feeling the way Ozu intends us to feel. This would then involve the calculus of interpolating the three storylines – so that each fragment from the subplot would also affect us in the way we think about and feel about the main story line.

That makes me believe that it would be good practice to reverse the method by which Ozu and his screenwriter constructed the screenplay. List all of the scenes of an Ozu movie and put them on index cards and then tried to re-order them in a way that gives a better effect – or a different effect than the one in the movie.

(15 March 2009)

Tokyo Monogatari

Hi Aki,

I ordered Tokyo Monogatari again so my dad could see it. What a shame they don’t have a restored print. It was Criterion Collection dvd, with commentary too, so they digitized the best print available. Maybe the original negatives are gone, such a shame.

I was noticing more little things. It really is a wonderful movie. No Hollywood movie today would spend a minute as the old guy says, ‘Where’s the air cushion?’ and the old wife says, ‘I can’t find it.’ ‘Well you had it…oh here it is.’ The actual scene goes on much longer than that, and is broken when the neighbor woman comes by to wish them bon voyage to Tokyo.

Also the daughter Shige (Haruko Sugimura), I never used to like her as performer, now I like her more and more. And I hated her character in this movie, I think we are supposed to dislike her, but I saw more of her strong, good side – she’s practical after all, and takes precautions, and so on. it’s easy to side with the sentimental ones, and dislike the practical ones, but somebody has to be practical. She was kind of acting like the head of the household after mama died.

Really one of Ozu’s best, I must concur. The critique is so gentle and soft.

No, I take it back about Ozu’s critique of the new Japanese generation in the movie. It might be more pointed than I thought. After all the youngest daughter explicitly in her only big speech, complains about her big sister’s attitude. And ‘good girl’ daughter-in-law Setsuko Hara defended big sis, saying, ‘I thought like you when I was young, but the truth is, women when they get older grow apart from their parents, and even you will end up thinking like her.’ But Kyoko the youngest daughter says, ‘I will never be like her, I don’t believe it!’

And I do think we are supposed to be boiling with anger against the 2 sons and big sis for the way they treat their parents.

I still have to listen to the commentary. But I must say, I’m a bit annoyed at the Criterion company: all the commentors on the Ozu disks are American, or British. where’s the Japanese commentary? I was very interested in what the French woman had to say about the Melville movies, and she knew what was going on in France both when the movies were made, and during the period they were set. Some guy from Georgia isn’t going to know how most families were really like in Tokyo 1953, would he?

(written around 22 February 2009)