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A true war film shoots at the viewer, says Fuller, Kon Ichikawa opens with a slap across the audience's face. The Japanese state of mind in the Philippines circa 1945 belongs to a tubercular infantryman (Eiji Funakoshi), depleted, unmoored, grimly resigned to the endless parade of horrors. From ruined camp to makeshift hospital, with a grenade in his pocket in case of rejection. "I was told to die, and I intend to." Being alive turns out to be the greater punishment in the landscape of disbanded Imperial soldiers, terrified local villagers, and trigger-happy Allied forces. Not the flowing musicality of The Burmese Harp but a jagged trail of scabrous spasms, not humanism but "monkey meat." "Come along, but be careful you don't get eaten." Ichikawa keeps a detached eye on the relentless descent, a widescreen strewn with contorted casualties is a scarring atrocity and yet a thing of appalling beauty. A hand sticks out of a mountain of skeletons, another lies severed and petrified amidst weeds. "Is this how we'll end up?" asks one of the sunken-eyed wanderers of a soggy corpse face down in a puddle. ("What's that?" replies the dead man in a bit right out of Dovzhenko's Arsenal.) The ant by the riverbank, the buzzard on the steeple, the hound at the end of the bayonet. Practically an alien planet of jungle and mud and smoke, perpetually on the verge of ghoulish farce. American tanks rumble in the darkness like a cyclops horde, a cracked grunt feasts on muck and offers a withered arm for consumption, the Buddha in his own mind. Huston's Treasure of the Sierra Madre governs the cannibalistic later sequences, hope for "normal lives" is the mirage in the rocky void. "I won't forget your kindness as long as I live." "That won't be long." Klimov's Come and See is the properly monstrous inheritor. Cinematography by Setsuo Kobayashi. With Osamu Takizawa, Mickey Curtis, Mantaro Ushio, Masaya Tsukida, Yoshihiro Hamaguchi, Kyu Sazanka, and Asao Sano. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |