This is more of a pointer to Barb’s great review of The Human Condition: I was going to write a mini-review of the movie(s) too, then realized that the act of writing was probably going to be just as exhausting, as she rightly put it, as the films themselves.
So, some notes instead, originally written for Barb’s comment box, and then it became longer and longer, and I didn’t want to be that obnoxious comment-writer who takes up too much space, so I said, what the hell, let me make a blog entry out of it:
There’s a part about the movie I don’t quite get, and I was trying out a different interpretation in my head to see if it fit, especially since it’s not completely supported by Kobayashi’s direction… I did wonder whether Kobayashi meant for Kaji’s stubborn idealism, as heroic as it was, to look foolish (if not foolhardy) as well.
We understand this in the beginning when he’s the slave-labor camp organizer working for reforms, but in Part 2, I surely couldn’t have been the only one in the audience frustrated with Kaji’s inability to fight back against the veteran soldiers. (If anything, Kaji’s own men would have lost respect for him.) At a few points in Part 3, he’s given a choice to save his own skin, and he consistently chooses the more “illogical” option, for which he pays dearly every time. And so I’m wondering whether Kobayashi wanted to portray Kaji with a little more ambivalence: Nakadai’s character fought all throughout against the cold inflexibility of the bureaucracy and the military and the strictness of his society in general, yet he himself was just as inflexible with his upstanding principles.
As epic and as “important” the movie is — and I agree with Barb that it was well worth seeing, particularly in a full nine-hour chunk — I’d argue that it just isn’t as cinematically impressive as his other films. Perhaps it’s the film’s unrelenting bleakness and Kobayashi’s unblinking refusal to give the audience any glimmer of hope or moment of catharsis, but no; I think it’s because The Human Condition ultimately suffers from a kind of emotional excess, and Kobayashi rarely hesitates here to pummel us with it. It’s just not the most subtle of filmmaking.
In my opinion, The Human Condition doesn’t come close to the gorgeous visual style of Kwaidan (1964) or the compact narrative economy (not to mention the thrills!) of Harakiri (1962). All very different movies, of course, but the theme of rebellion against a dying order is more effectively explored (and embodied) in the latter — certainly better than the increasingly impotent and stubborn Kaji.
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