Rhapsody In August

While their parents are off visiting relatives in Hawaii, four children spend the summer with their grandmother, Kane (Sachiko Murase), in Nagasaki. They become obsessed by the nuclear catastrophe which occurred there, asking endless questions and making frequent pilgrimages to the various memorials and bomb sites. Kane informs them about some of her experiences and family members who were lost. Meanwhile, in Hawaii, her long-unseen brother dies surrounded by his visiting nephews and nieces. His Eurasian son, Clark (Richard Gere), comes to Nagasaki to see his venerable aunt. A mild flurry is precipitated, as the family is unsure of how to handle the fact that Kane's husband was himself killed in the catastrophe, brought on by Clark's forebears. Frantic whisperings, attempts to save face and verbal confrontations ensue before the family finally bonds, the past forgiven, if not forgotten.

An autumnal movie in the fullest sense, awash with gentle emotions and emollient touches of humor, RHAPSODY IN AUGUST is also devoid of the raw energy and subversive wit that informed such classics as THE SEVEN SAMURAI, THRONE OF BLOOD or YOJIMBO. Kurosawa deals in the surface facts of the bombing's devastation, omitting the why or how of it. The subject of Pearl Harbor or, indeed, of anything about World War II, never really arises, despite all of the children's queries. The most he allows is Kane's magnanimous comment, "Only war is to blame. People do anything to win a war." Kurosawa has stated that his intention was not to make a film about or against the atomic bomb, but merely to show the feelings of children. If this, indeed, was his only purpose, surely a less incendiary backdrop could have been chosen.

This pallid, talky film attains a power equal to its subject only in the moment when Kane describes the bomb as looking like a huge eye, and the cerulean sky suddenly transforms itself into a monstrous apparition. Kurosawa succeeds in putting something of a human face, if a facile one, on those ubiquitous multitudes of Japanese tourists, but his view of the children is far too idealized. All four of them are perfect cherubs of decorum and sibling harmony. The youngest boy is right out of the noxious world of TV toothpaste commercials, a "lovable" rascal. The eldest one is addicted to noodling Beethoven's Fifth on a broken-down organ, which he vows he will fix before summer's end. (It's a foregone conclusion that he will, at the film's saccharine climax.) The kids become silent and strike graceful poses of awestruck wonder whenever confronted by physical evidence of the bombing.

The film, low-flying as it is, comes perilously close to taking a complete nosedive with the appearance of Richard Gere. It should be said that, even without makeup, he looks convincingly ethnic, and his phonetic Japanese is not bad; the earnestness of his intention seems, for once, genuine. (There is, however, a glaring historical inaccuracy in having Gere's father be a wealthy plantation owner in Hawaii. The Japanese worked the pineapple and sugar cane fields; they were never proprietors.) It is only when Gere reverts to English that his unshakable histrionic fraudulence asserts itself. "They're adorable!" he simpers upon meeting the youngsters at the airport, and, after hearing them sing together in that peculiar tonality of Japanese children, he enthuses, "Bravo! You sound like angels!" When he crosses a room to view a photograph of his late uncle, he lapses into that noxious, patented swagger familiar to audiences since his hopped-up hustler in LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR. Kurosawa approaches TEAHOUSE OF THE AUGUST MOON-Great White Father banality here, with tired touches like having the kids make up an elevated, Western-style bed for Gere, an aloha-shirted Mary Poppins. ("He's bigger than John Wayne!" one exclaims.)

The actors who portray the children's misguided parents are screaming caricatures of venality and insensitivity, fully in the cliched tradition of many children's films. As Kane, Murase is the best thing in the movie. Her innate dignity and mysterious feistiness admirably withstand her director's ofttimes too bathetic framing. She delights in scaring her grandchildren sleepless with local legends about water imps and evil snakes, and easily convinces viewers of the intense rapport she has with them. A few gorgeous shots of her at worship in a countryside Buddhist temple and, later, silently sitting with another survivor during a wordless late afternoon visit offer hints of an emotional richness and subtlety direly lacking overall.

Kurosawa stages a surreal, slow-motion finale, with Kane declining into senility and braving a storm to rejoin her dead husband on the anniversary of the bombing. The family pursues her frantically as a children's chorus wells up on the soundtrack; the entire conception is too simplistic by far, an arty last-minute fillip more bewildering than dramatically satisfying. If anything, RHAPSODY IN AUGUST proves conclusively that, like John Ford, Akira Kurasawa is a director whose primary strength is dazzling, kinesthetic action, not ideas.