James Reviews Aleksandr Sokurov’s The Sun [DVD Review]

A film that came out in 2005 to rave reviews during the Berlin Film Festival and is finally out on DVD here in the U.S. 5 years later sounds like an adventure all its own, but this is what happened to Aleksandr Sokurov’s ‘The Sun‘. Add to that already ardent fact is it is a film about the Japanese dictator Emperor Hirohito and his last days in power before Japan surrendered to the Allies in World War II, mostly set in the basement bunker of the Imperial Palace.

Hirohito (Issey Ogata) is a bit insane and suffers from dementia. He needs constant reminding of his divinity (being one with God was why the people believed he was ordained in the first place) and he’s almost childlike, needing servants to dress him and they are shocked to see this once worshipped ‘deity’ believes he’s not “Tenno” (Heavenly Emperor), but instead only one weird man who has bad breath and loves Western Culture, especially one silent film star he likes to dress up partially as.

We leave the Imperial Palace at one point for an encounter between Hirohito and the American general Douglas MacArthur (Robert Dawson), who invites him to dinner so they can discuss, like civilized men, how Japan will surrender to the Allies. But it’s staged almost like a horrible first date, awkward and unnerving, with Hirohito running off but ultimately coming back and just talking nonstop about random things, which has MacArthur excusing himself, only to call his “girlfriend” the President as a way to complain about the meeting itself. It’s almost comedic but really is a sad display of someone, up until recently, was shown as a peacemaker and stoic, not a neurotic mess the way Sokurov shows him.

Not only is Sokurov’s direction and framing of the film a wonderful eye-opening experience (which makes myself and everyone else have to seek out the other two films in his ‘dictator trilogy’, ‘Moloch’ which is about Hitler and the Lenin centric ‘Taurus’) but so is the tour-de-force performance by Issey Ogata. He somehow finds different ways to play neurotic and strange, giving Woody Allen a run for his money. He usually says more with his body than with words, his body being the dialogue of his character.

The script by Jeremy Noble and Yuri Arabov has a great sense of humor but a sense of humility, showing this once proud man who led Japan into WWII and now is almost giddy when he hears the American forces marching in Tokyo. His obsession with crabs and their beauty is a constant theme, which some people have said have a place in showing mental illness, especially in Japan. Was this what Sokurov going for in his Hirohito ‘revisionist’ history lesson? It’s a film that Kino Lorber Films thankfully have given us cinephiles a chance to sit back, watch this film with our colleagues and have rather intricate discussions about. Which is always what a good filmmaker wants their film to do.