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Rising Stars From the East and West
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10501 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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2 / 1986 |
1,638 Words |
| Author
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Tom Huntington
Tom Huntington is a film critic based in Washington, D.C. He
is the former managing editor for Saturday Review. |
Most parents would probably agree that having children can create a whole mess of problems. Two foreign films currently generating much interest, Akira Kurosawa's Ran and Jean-Luc Godard's Hail, Mary (Je Vous Salue, Marie) indicate just how bothersome offspring can sometimes be. Ran is Kurosawa's reworking of Shakespeare's King Lear, and its theme is "How sharper than a serpent's tooth to have a thankless child," with some of the director's own unique twists. Godard's film, also a retooling of an old story, concerns itself more with prebirth problems, and there are problems indeed when the mother-to-be turns out to be a virgin.
At the age of seventy-five, Akira Kurosawa is certainly one of cinema's grand old men, with a career spanning over forty years and twenty-seven films, including Rashoman, Yojimbo, and Seven Samurai. But because of his reputation as a relentless perfectionist who required large (by Japanese standards) budgets to make films that were "too Western" Kurosawa had fallen out of favor with the Japanese film industry by the seventies. Following his departure from the Pearl Harbor epic Tora! Tora! Tora! and the failure of Dodeskaden in the seventies, Kurosawa went through a period of depression and self-doubt that resulted in a suicide attempt in 1971.
Cinematic salvation came from the Soviet Union, which approached Kurosawa about filming a project on Soviet soil. The result was Dersu Uzala, which won the 1975 Academy Award for Best foreign Film. Kagemusha (1980), a Japanese feudal epic funded in part by Kurosawa admirers George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, was another critical success and a dress rehersal for Ran, Kurosawa's samurai adaptation of
... (1939 of 9531 Characters)
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