The late Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski said of the making of his masterwork The Decalogue, “We know no more than you. But maybe it is worth investigating the unknown, if only because the very feeling of not knowing is a painful one.”
Kielowski created influential works that delved into man’s relationship with the divine. At once looking for the connective tissue of faith and the flesh while at the same time posing the question of who is really responsible for the burden of spiritual guilt and the heavier burden of absolution.
In The Sun, director Aleksandr Sokurov takes the feeling of not knowing, and applies it to the final days of WWII and Japan’s surrender. Even involving a ruler believed by his people to be of divine descent, it is however the “not knowing” of an auteur more interested in this locus point of historical inevitability than as a meditation on the sacred and the secular.
Claustrophobic, elegant and fascinating, The Sun is a complete supposition of what may have occurred in those last days in Hirohito’s bunker. At times very abstract and yet incredibly intimate, and with an economy of language and locale, Sokurov is able to convey the yawning divide between Hirohito (Issei Ogata), his remaining subjects, the American forces embodied in General MacArthur (Robert Dawson) and the burden that history is about to lay at the feet of all concerned.
As portrayed by Ogata, Hirohito seems to exist inside and outside of himself at the same time. He’s a nervous, distracted scientist and poet who rarely displays the firmness of a leader and comes across more as an awkward wallflower at a dance than the leader of a country that threatened the stability and freedom of half the world. His interactions with his servants, American soldiers, his wife and MacArthur are played out like Waiting for Godot on separate alien chessboards. Most interesting are the moments of desperate interaction with his subjects and even an army interpreter, as all try to maintain Hirohito’s divinity as what remains of a cultural identity. Ogato doesn’t humanize Hirohito as much as use the character as a divining rod pointing to philosophical questions of power, destiny and responsibility. We’re always told absolute power corrupts absolutely and we’re told of the inevitable downfall of the powerful. But Hirohito was never a power-mad dictator. So what did he discern as his own humanity? He would have known that even if Japan would be rebuilt, that the toppling of an empire is a stopping point in history that will always exist out of time. Sokurov succeeds in showing that that humanity would never be untangled from the wreckage. – [DVD]
Drama/History
Not Rated
DVD Release Date: 6/1/10
[...] THE SUN [...]