Monday, February 5, 2018

Fires on the Plain (2014)

directed by Shinya Tsukamoto
Japan
87 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
----

Shinya Tsukamoto might be my favorite director of all time, I've seen almost all of his movies and I love them all. But I categorically dismissed Fires on the Plain when I first heard about it because I saw that it was a war movie, and mistakenly thought I wouldn't like it because of that. I was also hesitant because this is a re-interpretation of a book that I've never read, that was also made into a more famous movie by Kon Ichikawa that I've never seen. I shouldn't have doubted my favorite director, though.

It is about a group of Japanese soldiers in the Philippines in the last days of WWII, trying to survive the combined forces of faceless American attackers, local guerilla groups, and the harshness and scarcity of their environment. Tsukamoto himself plays the lead role, and I think he's the best he's ever been in it. This whole film is one of his best, and by the French acclaims in the opening credits, it looks like maybe "high cinema" has decided to finally give him the recognition he deserves as well.

Saying that this is a harrowing film is giving only a sparse description of exactly what it entails. It's at the same time very typical of the director and also very new for him. This is a strong contrast to his earlier works that focus on scrap heaps, rusty metal, car crashes, and all manner of things industrial, but a lot of the same trademarks carry over, like those scenes you find in the Tetsuo movies and others where the cameraperson basically throttles the hell out of the camera in the middle of loud noises and twisted metal. The difference is instead of hunks of steel and concrete, the camera is throttled in the midst of thick jungles, gunfire, and human flesh.

The transition from an urban/industrial environment to a jungle environment is really interesting to see here- I was thinking a lot during this about the temporality of war, the delineation of it. The backdrop of this film is strikingly green and beautiful, and when the blood and guts are absent from the shot, there's no visible differences between the thick forest in this and the "untouched" greenery advertised in tourist brochures to get people to come visit. There's the war fought by heads of state and country in far-removed war rooms, and then there's the war fought by the individual soldier. A good portion of the beginning of Fires on the Plain consists of men fighting over yams or trying to acquire more yams. Is that war? Does that count among the plans governments make to occupy one another's territory? I think one of the messages of this is that no matter how anybody plans out a war, there's always going to be individual soldiers enduring unimaginably dehumanizing conditions like shown in this film.

This feels extremely personal as well, and I deeply respect it in terms of filmmaking, because everything comes together so seamlessly to create something that looks and feels traumatic. Half of the ideas about the temporality of war I talked about only came to me because I just had to break my focus from what was onscreen from time to time. This is definitely not a good introduction to Shinya Tsukamoto because it's so unlike the rest of his work, but it's also definitely one of his best.

No comments:

Post a Comment