Dreams (Yume, 1990)
Kurosawa Akira
Japan, USA
119 min, color, Japanese (English subtitles)
This film is an odd entry in Kurosawa's filmography. Some find it spectacular due to ILM-backed special effects, but I find it mostly lacking in that department (with some exceptions, more below). Others find it irritating that some of the stories make little sense, but I find the explicit stories too didactic and irritating. In fact, this is a film that is contradictory: it is subtle and clumsy in style, intent, and execution. I would definitely suggest that unaware audiences should postpone viewing this unless they know (and love) Kurosawa. Otherwise, your experience with him may be soured by this film.
This omnibus film is a collection of eight (ten planned) stories, each representing a single dream of the director. Ordinarily, other people's dreams are among the most boring narratives to be subjected to. This, however, is Kurosawa, or so one would expect. The first four dreams are excellent: beautiful, stylish, and captivating. First, there's the story of AK as a little boy; contrary to his mother's instructions, he goes to the forest on a sunny rainy day and witnesses a fox wedding ceremony, something that is prohibited to humans (in Bulgaria, the equivalent story involves bears... go figure). Upon his return, his mother tells him that the foxes have seen him and gives him a knife; he must either commit suicide or ask the foxes for forgiveness. But to ask them, he must first find them, and they live under the rainbow. So the boy goes to find the rainbow (courtesy of ILM, and one of the few excellent effects in the film).
The second story is about a peach orchard. A slightly older Kurosawa follows an strange girl to the orchard, where all tries have been cut down. He sees the spirits of the trees, who dance for him. The girl turns out to be the spirit of the last peach tree, the only one that still lives. I think this is the most beautiful episode in the collection. The scenery is mesmerizing, the dance is superb, and the Heian-era costumes are simply gorgeous.
The third dream is about four mountain-climbers who are stranded in a severe snow storm. The storm tries to kill them but they survive. The sequence with the storm appearing as a beautiful woman and trying to lull one of the climbers into false sense of security is elegiac and the slow motion struggle is very dreamlike. The first part of that episode is a study of sound: there's hardly any noise except the clanking of metal, the rustle of snow, and the heavy uneven breathing of the exhausted men. If it weren't for the cheesy triumphant music at the end, this would have been one of the best sequences ever filmed.
The fourth dream is about an officer who is returning from war and who encounters the ghosts of the men he has sent to death with senseless orders to attack. It is a very moving piece, especially when the officer has to convince Private Noguchi that he really is dead. I did not like the entire platoon showing up, but cannot deny that their appearance was nothing short of ghastly. The first weakness of the film appears in this episode: Kurosawa has a very simplistic solution to the problem with conscience. I wish it were that easy: just command your memories appropriately and they obediently go away. I guess the reason the dog showed up a second time is because it does not understand Japanese!
Then we have the odd episode with Van Gogh. An older Kurosawa is so affected by one of Van Gogh's paintings that he enters the world of the painter. There, he meets with him, they exchange several inanities, and then Kurosawa walks through few of his paintings until he finds himself back in the gallery. The special effects were particularly badly done here, Scorcese was a truly awful Van Gogh, and the explicit visualization of metaphors (the painter says he's driven to paint like a train and then we are shown actual images of a train) is crude and annoying.
After the fifth dream, unfortunately, "Dreams" takes a nosedive. First, there's the absolutely hilarious (unintentionally so) story about a nuclear plant explosion. Now, Kurosawa has dealt far more successfully with the topic before. I do not know what purpose such an episode would serve. It is too shallow to be taken as a statement about the dangers of nuclear power. It is too melodramatic to have an emotional impact. It is sounds too much like a slogan, and a bad one, to carry the point across. The most revolting part to it has to be when the woman shouts that she was lied to about the safety of nuclear plants. It's so bad, it is embarrassing.
The sixth dream is about the aftermath of nuclear explosion, this time presumably a result of war (the "weeping" demon mentions something about missiles). Here, Kurosawa wanders about a desolate landscape where monstrous dandy-lions grow and where hungry demons lurk. He meets such a demon, who sobbingly tells him about the nuclear cause of this pollution (one wonders where, the hell, Kurosawa was when it happened) and then reveals that there are many other demons who feed on each other according to their hierarchical pecking order determined by the number of horns on their heads. Except that they are immortal and condemned to live in constant pain. He shows Kurosawa other demons and then threatens to turn him into one, upon which Kurosawa flees downhill. Pathetic.
Finally, we have the dream about the village with water-mills. The traveling Kurosawa happens there by chance and gets involved in a conversation with a really old man. This old man tells him about the evils of civilization, and how we should all go back to nature. It's not clear how that old man knows so much about civilization given that he's never left the village. Anyway, the man joins a cheery funeral procession, and Kurosawa leaves. Actually, the procession was beautifully done. The costumes are sort of funny, the music is upbeat, and the dancing is amusing. This part of the dream I really loved. The rest is just fluff masquerading as philosophy.
Overall, DREMS is an uneven experience, just like a real dream. For some reason, Kurosawa abandoned his customary subtle approach in favor of overt moralizing, which, however, ends up quite boring because it is simplistic and unoriginal. I wish that DREAMS was more like a true dream, where anything can happen, where there's really no logic, there's really no point, just images, preferably beautiful ones. Where the film sticks to that, it is great, but when Kurosawa tries to imbue it with meaning, it loses its pace. Watch with caution.
March 19, 2001. BLS