Mâdadayo (Kurosawa, 1993): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.20pm
This 35mm presentation (also screening on February 28th) is part of the Akira Kurosawa season. You can find the full details of the Kurosawa programme here.
Chicago Reader review:
The Japanese title literally means “not yet,” a child’s response to the
query “Are you ready?” in a game of hide-and-seek, and Akira Kurosawa’s
1993 film is his own way of saying the same thing. Written and directed
by Kurosawa at age 83, this very personal film, set between 1943 and
about 20 years later, concerns a retired professor (Tatsuo Matsumura),
his circle of adoring former students (all male), his cat, and his wife.
It?s full of moving moments, but unlike the exquisite Rhapsody in August
(1991) it can’t be regarded as major Kurosawa. Basically a series of
sketches drawn from the writings of Hyakken Uchida, the film
periodically calls to mind John Ford’s The Long Gray Line as an extended valediction (one long birthday gathering seems to go on forever). Madadayo
has the expressionistic simplicity of Kurosawa?s other late films,
their distillation and intensity of emotion; one of the lengthiest
episodes, about the loss of the hero’s cat, is especially powerful.
There’s something undeniably hermetic and at times sluggish about the
film’s style, but the sheer freedom of the discourse—the way Kurosawa
inserts brief flashbacks into the narrative whenever he feels like it or
ends the movie with a dream—is comparable in some ways to late Buñuel,
and the film shares his poignant sense of wonder.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Here (and above) is the trailer.
No comments:
Post a Comment