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Aside from the fact that it took four years for the film to receive an official US release (even more strange is the fact that the filmmaker's follow-up to that film got released here more than a year ago) Aleksandr Sokurov's The Sun is probably the closest the Russian heir apparent to Tarkovsky has ever come to making a straightforward crowd-pleasing motion picture. Of course calling a Sokurov film a crowd-pleaser is akin to saying William Burroughs wrote a page-turner for the masses once or John Cage composed a top forty Billboard hit. After all, popularity and accessibility take the proverbial back seat to genius almost every time. Yet, even as broodingly non-populist as The Sun is (and really, isn't most of Sokurov such?), it still manages to be the auteur's most accessible work to date. Of course this supposed accessibility is mocked by the fact that even after screening at the 2005 NYFF to relative acclaim (my own included), it took more than four years to reach American cinemas. There's that genius conundrum again.
Getting away from the vagaries of film distribution (don't try to understand it, it will only drive you crazy) and onto the story of the film, The Sun is about the Japanese Emperor Hirohito, or Emperor Showa as he is posthumously referred, and the final days before his surrender to General MacArthur and the Allies. Made in Japanese, Sokurov's forlorn biopic is the third of a proposed tetralogy on famous, and infamous world leaders, following Moloch (on Hitler) in 1999 and Taurus (on Lenin) in 2001. As per typical Sokurov form, the film is a languid portrayal of poetic melancholy. Perhaps not as lyrical as the filmmaker's gorgeously tragic mini-masterpiece of anguish, Mother and Son, nor as disturbingly arrogant as the harrowing, appropriately named Moloch, nor as audaciously bravura as his stunning experimental DV event du jour Russian Ark, his next-to-latest film plays all the chords one expects from the auteur. Perhaps also, much like last year's Alexandria (the alluded to follow-up from my opening salvo), The Sun sometimes seems a little too much like the chords one expects from the auteur.
Sometimes derivative of the filmmaker's past works (as often even the greatest auteurs are obviously guilty of) and inevitably acting as a mere chapter in the overall oeuvre, The Sun, though masterfully manipulated and a thing of rare dark and suffering beauty to gaze upon, does not sit atop the director's most prized possessions as it were. All that said, The Sun is still a powerful work of empty denial and one of the strongest biopics of the last decade or so. Much of what makes this be so, is the man playing Hirohito. The heart of the film - the slow, pulsating aeonian if you will - is an actor by the name of Issei Ogata, who is mostly known by cinephiles for his role in Edward Yang's acclaimed Yi Yi a decade ago. In playing the Emperor, Ogata and his director took a huge risk. Legendarily taboo to portray an Emperor on film (they are considered to be sacred, even God-like, by Japanese standards) and pre-warned by master Japanese filmmaker Nagisa Oshima who told the director a tale of attempts on his own life after speaking out against the Japanese government and their involvement in WWII, Sokurov held the secret of his lead actor until the film first screened for an audience.
Quite reminiscent of Boris Karloff being kept under wraps during the filming of Frankenstein (though no one's lives were ever threatened as far as I know) this ploy ends up perhaps enhancing the already inherent mysticism surrounding Ogata's portrayal of said Emperor. Portrayed as an eccentric character rambling around his bunker, Ogata's Hirohito is part Charles Foster Kane, part Charlie Chaplin. The Emperor is even ridiculed for looking like Chaplin by a group of typically obnoxious American soldiers. It is this style - this eccentricity of performance - that gives the role - and movie in turn - an even deeper mystical bent. It is this that makes an otherwise typically Sokurovian work seem all that more awe-inspiring beyond mere visual moodiness. I suppose we should just be happy the film is finally here and leave it at that. [11/25/09]
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