
Impeccably formalized but rife with dissonance,
The Sun charts the last days in the rule
of Japanese emperor Hirohito (Issei Ogata). The third entry in Aleksandr
Sokurov’s “Men of Power” series, this haunting portrait of the vanquished WWII
Japanese leader is another of the
Russian
Ark auteur’s strange, beguiling ruminations on mortality and power, here
revolving around the nearly otherworldly uneasiness that surrounds Hirohito and
his doting underlings on the eve of his 1945 meeting-cum-surrender to General
Douglas MacArthur (Robert Dawson). Sokurov’s film sidesteps deep inquiry into
the global historical events at play in favor of fixating rigidly on Hirohito’s
inner life. The action is confined to a series of static, eerily tranquil
sequences in which Hirohito – in rooms whose silence is broken up only by
ominously discordant buzzing and humming that suggest the sound of a monumental
machine grinding toward an inevitable, unpleasant death – is dressed, studies
marine biology, writes poetry, flips through a photo album and, in the film’s
one unhinged expressionistic moment, dreams of Tokyo’s firebombing as a
nightmare of flying fish. There’s more than a whiff of Tarkovsky (a director
Sokurov favors, and is often compared to) as well as Kubrick to these
unsettling proceedings, though if the material is beset by grave melancholy,
humor also sporadically materializes to push the atmosphere toward mesmeric
disorder. Throughout, Hirohito’s inability (as well as that of those around
him) to fully grasp the historic moment of transition taking place – both in terms
of Japan’s notions of dominant-culture identity and the idea of the emperor’s
supposed status as a deity rather than a man – is persistent and disconcerting,
the film infused with a sense of political and psychological fracturing. In
Ogata’s masterfully mannered performance, his eyes cast into
thousand-mile-stares, his comportment unnaturally stiff and yet dignified, and
his mouth slightly open and often silently mouthing incomprehensible
mutterings,
The Sun brings both humanity
and borderline-alien peculiarity to its examination of tectonic internal and
external changes. It finds beauty, madness and outright bizarreness in the
sight of a lost, slightly freakish man attempting to understand his altering
reality, and enact his own rebirth from god to man, while trapped in a disorienting
fugue.
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