WW2 -- the big one

I am no fan of Alexander Sokurov (Russian Ark, Mother and Son), but he got through to me a bit with The Sun  (2004 --2009 in US -- dvd).  For some, he is painterly -- for others, like watching paint dry.  Always slow and enigmatic, his films appeal to me less than those of his mentor Tarkovsky.  But here he has an interesting subject to examine through his eccentric lens, sort of Downfall  in Japan, with Hirohito in the bunker instead of Hitler.  At the very end of the war, with the Americans closing in, the Emperor is trapped more by his divine status than by his encircling enemies.  A rhapsodizing marine biologist, with a passion for American movies, and busts of Darwin and Lincoln on his desk (Napoleon goes in the drawer once defeat is certain), Sokurov’s Hirohito is a strange but sympathetic character, who almost embraces his humiliation at the hands of MacArthur.  He has a comic demeanor reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin, with an odd fish-like way of moving his mouth, well-played by Issey Ogata (who was the Japanese computer guru in Yi Yi).  Too bad the actor playing MacArthur seems laughable to an American audience.  The visuals are also sometimes oddly artificial, but still the film has a cumulative power.  *7-*  (MC-85)

Another Eastern Bloc film about World War II that got a belated release in the U.S. last year, apparently not embraced so much by the critics, was Katyń  (2007, dvd), the culminating work of Polish old master Andrzej Wajda.  Of course it was news of the recent plane crash that killed most of the Polish government -- on their way to Katyń to commemorate the cold-blooded execution of some twenty thousand Polish officers by the Russians in 1940 – that led me to watch this film, though Wajda’s politically engaged cinema has always appealed to me, going back to Kanal (1957).  In this film, he returns to the formative event of his youth and one of the great tragedies of typically-tragic Polish history.  His father was one of the officers killed at Katyń, and the uncertainty over his father’s fate destroyed his mother, so he was on his own from the age of thirteen.  There are two stories in the film – the crime and the lie.  Stalin ordered the genocidal act, and then covered it up by blaming it on the Nazis, a fabrication self-evidently false but stringently enforced.  So there are two perspectives in the film – from the women’s and the men’s point of view.  The first is given priority, as we shift between wives and mothers, sisters and daughters, as they each approach the truth of what happened to their men.  We finally see the mechanics of the massacre at the end, in a scene of crushing power and devastating impact.  Nobody’s idea of entertainment, this is an essential film.  *7*  (MC-81)