Happy Birthday, Brad Dourif
Seems meddled with, quite clunky in spots like the connective tissue is missing. But its truncated, paranoid delirium is intoxicating and shockingly visceral. As someone else said, right from the jump we're confronted with real pain.
Not sure about the climactic sequence in the dunes/at the beach--neither about what's happening nor if (after the first fight watched from above at least) it's anything but boldly-staged/blocked misogyny and contrived neurosis. Everything preceding that is fantastic: brisk, mean and in-step with the concurrent New Wave in many formal and stylistic ways. A second watch might change my mind about the climax.
Meager subs on the version I watched may have been at the root of why I found this so opaque and borderline incoherent on first watch. Even so I'm struck as always by how Kurosawa uses the rhythms of routine work and domesticity as part of his particular kind of eerie, distanced, suggestive understatement.
This undeniably, heavily racist, ableist, silly movie has more heart, blazing imagination, invention and humanity than most other movies--especially those seeping from the heavily corporatized corpse that's waved in front of our face as mass culture. There's racism baked into the very premise, but enough complexity and nuance in the principal cast's character turns and dialogue to make both the movie and the discussion around it much more complicated and intriguing.
The formal wizardry, tricks, gags, optical effects and all-in…
