This is an elegaically slow but fascinating portrait of the Japanese Emperor Hirohito (Issei Ogata) in the last days of the Second World War and his capitulation to the American Emperor MacArthur (Robert Dawson).
Hirohito is something like a bonsai tree: an odd little ordinary man who makes dilettantish stabs at poetry and marine biology and does strange things with his lips, obsessively and protectively pampered and pruned by ever-present servants, as though potted in an imposed self-absorption.
The imposition in this instance is the Shinto religious belief that the emperor is a god by virtue of his birth. He is revered and worshipped as a god, but his ‘godliness’ does not appear to confer any actual or earthly power, besides ceremonial reverence. Members of the Japanese government and military give the emperor deference, but mostly handle the mundane human details of ruling the country and Japanese overseas empire and running the war themselves.
In a sense, this Hirohito is something like Jerzy Kosinski’s gnomic Chance the gardener in Being There.
On the other hand, the film leaves us no doubt that American General-of-the-Army Douglas MacArthur is an emperor with god-like powers. Like Hirohito, MacArthur is shown mostly by himself in sumptuous settings, but it is clear that vast military, economic and political power put him there and back him up, and he has an ego to match.
One of the things that MacArthur saw as key to the pacification of occupied Japan was ending or at least removing any potential threat posed by the traditional state religion of emperor worship. He did this by convincing Hirohito to renounce his divine origin and nature in a public address broadcast to the nation.
This is a strange solution, in a sense, because the emperor’s divinity is a fact that attaches to the person, and not really within that person’s power to assume or reject—though maybe the new American emperor had—or thought he had—such power.
In the final scene, the Emperor, no longer a god and happy to be reunited in peacetime with his Empress and their children, asks his chamberlain (Shiro Sano) about the sound technician who had taped his speech to the people renunciating his divinity. The chamberlain tells him that the technician committed hara-kiri.
‘Did you try to stop him?’ the Emperor wonders—‘No.’
Roll credits.
This is an odd and oddly effecting film. It is shot in the muted colors of film dream or memory that somewhat resembles color retouched Japanese photography of the period. It should come as no surprise that the director is also the director of photography.
This film is one of three intimate profiles Sokurov has made of historical figures. He also directed Moloch [Молох] (1999), a domestic portrait of Adolf Hitler, Eva Braun and several close advisors set in Berchtesgaden in 1942, and Taurus [Телец] (2001), recounting Vladimir Lenin’s last days.
Sokurov may be best known in the United States for his 90-minute feature film Russian Ark [Русский ковчег] (2002), an historical fantasia shot in a single continuous take in the former Winter Palace of the Hermitage, now the Hermitage Museum, in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Theatrical trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA9RMgA3G6w
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