Rhapsody in August
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Features
• Anamorphic
• Closed-captioned
• Color
• DVD-Video
• Subtitled
• Widescreen
• NTSC
In Theaters : 20 December, 1991
DVD Release : 01 July, 2003 |
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Rhapsody in August description
The final film released in the U.S. by Japanese master Akira Kurosawa looks at the atomic blast at Nagasaki from a distance of more than 40 years, through the eyes of a woman who survived it--and the grandchildren who are spending the summer with her. Though she tries not to think about it, the memory of the bombing is with her every day, in the f ... review details
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Rhapsody in August Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
Still life with atomic bomb
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Even a master like Kurosawa must occasionally make a non-masterpiece. Overwhelmed by his own desire to make a political point, he forgot to be a story teller and "Rhapsody in August" ends up falling flat. Not that it is a bad film, as even a flat Kurosawa film is worth watching, and there are flashes of pure brilliance and some incredibly moving images, but on the whole it doesn't compare favorably with his body of work.
The story is an inter-generational one, focused on an aging grandmother, Kane, who hosts her grandchildren in her rural home in Nagasaki while their parents visit relatives in Hawaii. Kane is a hibakusha, one who experienced the dropping of the atomic bomb during WWII, during which her husband was killed. For Kane, the atomic bomb is a very real thing, while for her grandchildren it is a distant sob-story they were forced to memorize at school. Richard Gere makes an awkward appearance as Kane's half-American grandson from Hawaii, speaking stilted Japanese, but doing his best to fit into the overall story.
Much of the controversy on this film is about Kurosawa's point of view of Japan as a victimized nation of the US war crime of dropping the atomic bomb, a point of view that is very much prevalent in Japan even today. To the Japanese, the story of Nagasaki is very much that of regular civilians like Kane, who were not part of the war, who were not off killing and maiming in China or doing anything else the US politicians use to justify the bomb, but who suffered the brunt of the US attack in spite of their innocence. Much of the story rings true in this sense. When I visited the Nagasaki Peace Park, and saw the monuments donated by the nations of the world, I too looked for the US monument and was surprised not to find one. Seeing this scene played out on film hit close to home, and I realized that must be the general reaction to everyone who visits the park.
But the flaws of "Rhapsody in August" are not the controversial message, but just the general malaise of a film without inspiration. The scenes of the urban schoolchildren at play in rural Japan are excellent, and a spot-on Summer Idyll of kids that age stuck in that situation. Kane's scenes with Richard Gere are quite touching, showing the power of communication across generations and language, simply by being together. However much of the story seems to go forward in a heavy-handed rather than natural direction, and much of the dialog is stiff and unnatural. |
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Rhapsody in August dvd movie.