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Akira Kurosawa's Dreams

Dreams

United States, Japan

1990

119 Min

Color

French, Japanese

Currently 4.0/5 Stars.
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DIR Akira Kurosawa, Ishiro Honda

PROD Mike Y. Inoue, Hisao Kurosawa

CAST Akira Terao, Mitsuko Baisho, Toshie Negishi

Following up on his critically acclaimed, blood-splattered epic Ran, master director Akira Kurosawa looks inward with this collection of eight brightly colored dreams. The first section centers on a young boy (Mitsunori Izaki), who witnesses a forest wedding procession of fox spirits in spite of his mother’s (Mitsuko Baisho) warning. The second section concerns the same lad who converses with peach-tree spirits after the trees have been cruelly cut down. This is followed by a party of mountain climbers struggling to make it back to base camp in the midst of a terrible blizzard. The fourth dream deals with a man (Akira Terao) — a Kurosawa stand-in complete with the director’s trademark floppy white hat — who encounters ghosts of Japan’s militaristic past in a forlorn tunnel. In the following dream, the same man ventures into a Van Gogh painting called The Crows and meets the artist himself (Martin Scorsese). The sixth and seventh dreams venture into nightmare territory — one deals with a nuclear meltdown that threatens Japan while the other concerns post-nuclear mutants. In the final dream, Kurosawa meets a 103-year-old man (played by Ozu regular Chishu Ryu) in a utopian rural village. —allmovie guide

Director

Akira Kurosawa

The son of an army officer, Kurosawa studied art before gravitating to film as a means of supporting himself. He served seven years as an assistant to director Kajiro Yamamoto before he began his own directorial career with Sanshiro Sugata (1943), a film about the 19th century struggle for supremacy between adherents of judo and jujitsu that so impressed the military government, he was prevailed upon to make a sequel (Sanshiro Sugata Part Two). Following the end of World War II, Kurosawa’s career gathered speed with a series of films that cut across all genres, from crime thrillers to period dramas. Among the latter, his Rashomon (1951) became the first postwar Japanese film to find wide favor with Western audiences. It was Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai (1954), however, that made the largest impact of any of his movies outside of Japan. Although heavily cut for its original release, this three-hour-plus medieval action drama, shot with painstaking attention to both dramatic and period… read more

The son of an army officer, Kurosawa studied art before gravitating to film as a means of supporting himself. He served seven years as an assistant to director Kajiro Yamamoto before he began his own directorial career with Sanshiro Sugata (1943), a film about the 19th century struggle for supremacy between adherents of judo and jujitsu that so impressed the military government, he was prevailed upon to make a sequel (Sanshiro Sugata Part Two). Following the end of World War II, Kurosawa’s career gathered speed with a series of films that cut across all genres, from crime thrillers to period dramas. Among the latter, his Rashomon (1951) became the first postwar Japanese film to find wide favor with Western audiences. It was Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai (1954), however, that made the largest impact of any of his movies outside of Japan. Although heavily cut for its original release, this three-hour-plus medieval action drama, shot with painstaking attention to both dramatic and period detail, became one of the most popular Japanese films of all time in the West, and every subsequent Kurosawa film has been released in the U.S. in some form, even if many, most notably The Hidden Fortress (1958), were cut down in length. In 1964, Rashomon was remade in a Western setting as The Outrage, while Yojimbo was remade by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars. The Seven Samurai (1954) fared best of all, serving as the basis for John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven (which had been the original title of Kurosawa’s movie) in 1960; the remake actually did better business in Japan than the original. In 1985, an unfilmed screenplay of Kurosawa’s also served as the basis for Runaway Train, a popular action thriller. Kurosawa’s movies subsequent to his period thriller Sanjuro (1962) abandoned the action format in favor of more esoteric and serious drama, including his epic-length medical melodrama Red Beard (1965). In later years, despite ill health and problems getting financing for his more ambitious films, Kurosawa remained the most prominent of Japanese filmmakers until his death in 1998. With his Westernized style, Kurosawa always found a wider audience and more financing opportunities in Europe and America than he did in his own country. A sensitive romantic at heart, with a sentimental streak that occasionally rose forcefully to the surface of his movies, his work probably resembles that of John Ford more closely than it does any of his fellow Japanese directors.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:98309~T1)

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