"Dreams" (1990)

Most famous for his 50's-60's era samurai classics such as "Shichinin no Samurai" (aka "The Seven Samurai"), legendary, late-great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa conceives a swan song art-house piece simply titled "Dreams" in 1990 at the ripe old age of 80. Apparently based upon the director's own actual dreams, "Dreams" is comprised of eight short segments, one for each dream. This is not a collection that gives us a cohesive story. It is simply an eclectic mix, generally, of what I would call "lesson" segments, only loosely tied together through similiar, recurring themes.

The first two dreams involve a boy (I'm guessing a young Kurosawa), and although they are two disparate adventures, they involve the same boy and a similiar structure. With these two segments we immediately get a taste for the film's style , which is a minimalist surrealism, with meticulous cinematography and a grand display of film school "mis en scene". Unfortunately, what we are also introduced to is, a painfully slow pace. Now film guru's are obviously accustomed to your typical snail-paced, indie arthouse fare, but here, it's well, flat and uninteresting. These two segments, involving a procession of dancing "foxes" (a parade of choreographed actors in mask and costume) slowly advancing in some strange, carefully synchronized movement through the woods, and another large ensemble of actors (this time representing tree spirits) in ceramic doll get up doing a sort of interpretive dance amongst stagey looking levels of land. These opening vignettes, though lacking in clarity and focus, seem to be an allegory of sorts in regards to the mystique of nature and the power it wields and the respect it commands, which paves the way for the latter half of the film's in-your-face motifs of mankind's recklessness and foolishness in regards to nature and the environment.

An interesting second-half segment involves its recurring thirty-something, perpetually bewildered looking Japanese wanderer. He is in an art museum, perusing a wall of Vincent Van Gogh paintings, and soon, courtesy of George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic effects studios, gets sucked in to one of them and wanders through a succession of paintings in those familiar deep focus long shots that Kurosawa seems to be quite fond of in this film. The man eventually stumbles upon non other than Van Gogh himself, played by a virtually unrecognizable (both visually and sonically) Martin Scorsese, who goes off on a didactic babbling of the creative process, as the man just looks upon him in bewilderment and continues following him around (this pretty much sums up what this actor will be doing throughout every subsequent piece). If it weren't for Marty's entertainingly punchy delivery and a darkly pleasing piano score, this could have been the most trite, banal, and just god awful short of the lot.

After this, is simply a whole lot of cautionary preaching and long winded, didactic passages that honestly had my eyes rolling and mind wandering every so often. We have "Mount Fuji in Red", a 'fallacy of man harming the earth through technology' segment, where the dangers of nuclear power are brought to light. I definitely got the allusion to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the not only immediate but more long term subsequent damage from the infamous WWII A-bomb attacks: "It makes monstrosities", and "Man's stupidity is unbelievable", says the one guilty surviving man to the other (none other than our lanky, perpetually bewildered wanderer). Then comes "The Weeping Demon", yet another cautionary tale on the hazards of nuclear power that puts us in a strange, post-apocalyptic wasteland with our bewildered meanderer. Again, we have a succession of deep focus long shots of the man wandering the barren, nuclear-afflicted terrain. And he eventually stumbles upon the "demon", who is in fact a former human turned horned monstrosity, a casualty of the supposed nuclear attack. Through the demon's subsequent lecturing of the horrific state of the union, we again get an allusion to A-bomb WWII. "The nuclear missiles", he says, and points to the gigantic "Monster dandelions". The preposterously enlarged flowers, as a result of the missile attacks, is definitely a play-off of Japanese post WWII fears of the effects of nuclear radiation (i.e., Godzilla). Again, the horrors of, mistakes and mishaps of man: "Stupid mankind did this", says the demon. And an interesting visual scene is where the two overlook a large group of suffering "demons", all tortured moans and wails, writhing and staggering in pain amidst a hellish valley. It is man condemned to see himself as the monster that he is in regards to the sins he has committed in life. They have nothing but the company of their rotten selves for all eternity, which is essentially what hell is. God is nature. Hell is the separation from god.

As if we aren't getting the message, Kurosawa relentlessly pounds these 'man against nature' motifs into these drawn out dream sequences. Man pays for their sins, their sins against nature and the environment. Yawn. And in the final, lofty (though welcomingly serene) sequence, "Village of Watermills", we recieve more criticism on humankind and technology. The recipe for what follows our perpetually bewildered recurrent wanderer stumbling upon the wise old man, is: Native American outlook mixed with a little 19th century transendentalism, and 60's hippie movement. Visually, we get some nice eye candy: lush greens and pastels, beautiful shot composition, and an overall Thomas Kinkade aesthetic. It truly is pleasant to look at. So, of course, the wise old village man utilizes nature the right way, out of respect for it. During his overlong monologue, he says, "We try to live the way man used to...that's the natural way of life", as the wandering man (guess who) just sits and attentively gawks, soaking in Wise Man's didactic preaching. He continues, "People today have forgotten they're really just a part of nature...yet, they destroy the nature on which our lives depend." Noted. And I think the audience gets the point by now. I sure did. And I sure as hell didn't want to get any more.

Overall, we know great directors tend to meander and experiment with age. And here, in the case of "Dreams" and Akira Kurosawa, is no exception. The film was a bit too preachy for me. The work as a whole comes across as self-indulgent and pretentious, and the moralizing could have been done in a more discreet, creative way, particularly in "Village of Watermills", which contained just a little too much sentimentality and preachiness. And the preceding "Mount Fuji in Red" and "Weeping Demon" both laid Kurosawa's sermonizing on thick as well, and "Village", hot on their heels, was a bit much to take. For me, a message loses it's affect once it has beaten me into submission. If you're going to lecture me, at least make it entertaining. And I believe Kurosawa has failed in that department.