Available on Blu-Ray now.
We can allow great artists an occasional indulgence. When that great artist is Akira Kurosawa, it’s unsurprising that the modern Titans he influenced leapt to assist him. Finding it difficult to finance his projects in Japan, even after the colossal artistic achievement of Ran five years earlier, his late passion project Dreams was partly financed by Warner Bros, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and George Lucas (whose company Industrial Light & Magic provided the special effects.
A series of magic-realist vignettes based on recurring dreams Kurosawa had throughout his life, Dreams ranges from cautionary childhood tales, through reverential and respectful stories of traditional Japanese myths and legends, to adult regret and terrifying visions of nuclear apocalypse. As is the case with such anthology films, the results are varied and some will linger longer in the memory more than others, but the variety on show demonstrates the old master’s extraordinary versatility and painterly eye.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the fifth part, ‘Crows’, in which a young man (Akira Terao, an obvious surrogate for Kurosawa himself), literally wanders into the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh and meets the cantankerous artist himself, played with amusing relish by Martin Scorsese. The exquisite, retina-stroking colours of the artist are conveyed beautifully and framed immaculately, aided by the gorgeous Criterion transfer to Blu-Ray. If the young man’s conversation with Van Gogh about art and integrity tends to solipsism and wish fulfillment, then any pretension is more than forgiven thanks to the lush visuals in which one could languish like a reclining bather in the Dead Sea.
Other highlights include another gorgeous sequence in ‘The Peach Orchard’, in which the child Kurosawa dreams of a mysterious girl, and a dance performed by the spirits of a felled orchard of peach trees. It’s an aching elegy for lost childhood, the loss of the traditional way of life, and perhaps late-life grief for Kurosawa’s sister, who died when he was a child. Again, his use of colour and composition is utterly compelling, any individual frame worthy of being hung in a gallery.
Some of the vignettes unfortunately don’t resonate as strongly. Both ‘Mount Fuji in Red’ and ‘The Weeping Demon’, the sixth and seventh tales, lack the subtlety of the earlier pieces. There is righteous fury aplenty at the spectre of nuclear destruction, but there is a simplistic and moralistic finger-wagging that is clumsy compared to what has gone before.
Thankfully, ‘Village of the Watermills’ closes the film in more optimistic territory. A bucolic ode to the simple life, Kurosawa seems to be reflecting on his mortality. Legendary Tokyo Story leading man Chishu Ryu plays a centenarian explaining a celebratory funeral rite in the village. It’s a reassuring, gentle end to a diverse, occasionally troubling collection of stories. There would be two more films to follow before his death in 1998, but this feels like a man who has come to terms with himself and his place in the world.