The enigmatic figure of Emperor Hirohito comes under Russian director Alexander Sokurov’s microscope in “The Sun.” The view is penetrating.
Sokurov proved with “Moloch” (1999), which examined Adolf Hitler, that he is not suited to an ordinary film bio method. He works in a rarefied style, and in this film he distills the essence of Hirohito (and by extension, wartime Japan) by selecting a few key moments from inside the emperor’s final days as a god.
A god: Recall that Hirohito assumed divine status during his reign. He renounced this status only as the war was collapsing around Japan.
Issey Ogata, who plays Hirohito, is certainly human. Throughout his performance, he moves his mouth in a facial twitch that becomes almost hypnotizing in its grotesqueness.
We see the emperor inside his sheltered world, as he meets with desperate advisers and receives instructions on how to meet with the U.S. commander Douglas MacArthur (Robert Dawson).
We see just how sheltered Hirohito has been in the film’s great details. When a U.S. soldier waves him into a car, we see the emperor hesitate. He appears uncertain about how to get into an ordinary automobile, just as later he looks puzzled at the prospect of opening a door for himself.
The emperor is at home, however, in a laboratory in his palace, where he contentedly examines little specimens of sea creatures in his guise as amateur marine biologist. That’s the movie’s premise in a nutshell, or, possibly, a sea shell: an articulate person, given to reciting poetry or pondering nature, who is fatally, disastrously removed from the consequences of his policies.
Except for a brief sequence in which Hirohito seems to be imagining the nightmare of a fire-bombing, World War II happens entirely off screen. Yet this gives us an even stronger sense that within these decorous rooms lie the causes of unthinkable bloodshed.
Sokurov’s style is not dramatic in the ordinary sense (although “The Sun” is much more accessible than the opaque “Moloch”), yet the accumulation of events gains force. Hirohito’s two discussions with Gen. MacArthur are rife with issues of diplomacy and power.
This style pays off in the final sequence, in which we finally meet the emperor’s wife. It doesn’t tie up everything neatly, but it is devastating.
“The Sun” showed at film festivals in 2005. Perhaps it’s making the regular circuit now because of the strong reception to Sokurov’s “Alexandra” last year. Whatever the reason, this is a worthwhile film to be rescued from obscurity.
“The Sun” (three stars)
Not the usual biopic by any means, this study of Emperor Hirohito concentrates on the isolated dictator inside his palace and in meetings with Gen. MacArthur, where the extent of Hirohito’s fatal detachment from his actions is devastatingly conveyed. Filmmaker Alexander Sokurov works with the slow accumulation of details, which fits the subject well. In Japanese and English, with English subtitles.
Rated: Not rated; probably PG for subject matter
Showing: Northwest Film Forum
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