Akira Kurosawa's early gendaigeki
...wo themes. Released at a time when “at least on a superficial level, the values of the past were totally rejected” , No Regrets…amalgamates the true stories of a university professor, Yukitoki Takigawa, and an intellectual who turned against his country, Hotsumi Ozaka. Both were currently considered martyrs of a fascist regime. They are both represented under alternate names, Yagihari and Noge, but significantly, it is Setsuko Hara’s Yukie who takes the leading role, the only lead ever given to a woman by the director. Her travails to find a sense of ‘self’ form the dramatic structure of the film, as she goes from middle-class piano player to determined agrarian, in memory of Noge’s idealism. With regards to directorial style, a few identifiable traits of Kurosawa films are present in the film. The exhilaration of nature is reflected literally in the sunlight that imposes itself in the opening images, a joyous response to “the new freedom from wartime censorship” . The concept of highly-charged emotional sequences played out under extreme weather conditions, in this case the rainstorm in which Yukie determinedly goes out in to save her crops, also makes an early appearance here. Finally, the expressive attempts to symbolically render Yukie’s psychological interiority, when she can no longer carry the load on her back, will become familiar in similar efforts to convey the plights of a Matsunaga or a Watanabe . Ultimately though, the film is too swamped by the designs of democracy to make a distinctive addition to a body of work, or even to make a coherent film. The reasons for Yukie’s radical change of lifestyle are never sufficiently illustrated, and thus her character is unbalanced, and hard to sympathise with. No Regrets… might even be construed as Kurosawa’s attempt to distance himself from the fact that he, and the actors he reuses here, uncomplainingly made films under a militarist regime, at a time when directors were concerned as to the implications of their former work. In the exposition’s narrative, it is said that “professors and students fought the suppression” of militarism, a defensive gesture implying resistance to the former rule. Later, Noge’s arrest in a coffee shop “reminds us of Kurosawa’s own narrow escape from arrest in a coffee shop” , due to his involvement in a leftist movement; as if to prompt the new government to remember whose side he was really on. Nevertheless, critics have interpreted a coded resistance to Occupation rule in Kurosawa’s film. Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto argues that “war does not really change her (Yukie’s) subjectivity” as Macarthur might hope. He goes on to claim that the final image, of Yukie’s smile as she is offered a lift by a passing truck, is “extremely ambivalent”, and “registers Kurosawa’s resistance to the Occupation’s attempt to propagate their version of recent Japanese history” . This is a lot to read into a smile, especially when a more fruitful analysis might be of the accompanying music that closes the film. It is that of a type classically used in Hollywood cinema to announce a villain or imminent peril, just as Yukie sits among the villagers, a symbol of the new Japan. It then shifts into a more appropriate melody, but a message of dissent, albeit briefly, was discernible. Kurosawa would go on to make his criticisms of the Occupation more overt, and his personal flourish more noticeable. For the Civil Information and Education section, “the attraction of Yukie (lay) in her ability to convert herself” , and Kurosawa’s career would go on to be littered with characters who, through individual choice, become better people. First however, he would deal with the tragic figure of Matsunaga, who fails to take the right path despite the chances offered to him. In Drunken Angel, Toshiro Mifune’s tuberculous yakuza is a throwback to the old feudal values of honour and duty. His consumption is a metaphor for the canker at the heart of his out-dated ideology, and to recover, he must renounce his old ways. This is powerfully put across in an expressionist dream sequence, when Matsunaga is confronted with, and chased by, his own self as an abject figure, on a beach symbolising the boundary between life and death; a motif that Takeshi Kitano uses today. His ultimate failure to change, despite the best efforts of those who help him, is despairingly predicted by Dr. Sanada in noticing that as well as his lungs being infected, “it’s his heart- that’s about to go too”. Yet the idea that Matsunaga is spiritually diseased solely due to his dangerous (at least to the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers) Imperial values is denied both verbally and visually, in a film that is much more brutally frank in its depiction of the state that post-war Japan was in. The turmoil and misery at the heart of Japan’s recovery from defeat is palpable in the setting for Drunken Angel, of an underprivileged community living around a disease-ridden sump. As if to illustrate the very real financial problems affecting the country, the set was a second-hand one, previously used on Yamamoto Kajiro’s New Age of Fools (1947). Just as Italian filmmakers were making Neo-Realist films echoing what their country’s life was like, such as Vittoria de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), so the films of another defeated country were being allowed to demonstrate a Japan identifiable to the majority of audiences. The CIE were apparently content for Kurosawa to present such miserable lives, providing that their tenets were upheld in the overall thematic message: that there is a remedy to social ills providing the individual will to overcome is strong enough. Nevertheless, there is often the implication that the American encroachment on Japanese life is, if not worse than before, then certainly no better. Okada, the vicious yakuza boss, returns from prison halfway through the plot and “lays claim to Matsunaga’s soul” . His removal from current affairs for the previous few years is a convenient narrative device for detached assessment of the contemporary situation. His impression is that “everything’s changed round here”, but “the only thing that hasn’t changed is this filthy swamp!”. In other words, there had been drastic upheaval, but the malaise that had affected Japan during Imperial rule still remained with the Occupation. Later in the film, as the ravages of tuberculos...