The Sun
Dir: Alexander Sokurov
Rating: 4.0/5.0
Lorber Films
110 Minutes
Though it took four years to reach American cinemas, Alexander Sokurov’s The Sun, which features a look at the last hours of Japan’s Emperor Hirohito (Issei Ogata) before he surrendering to the United States, is an astounding work of intimate detail that should not be missed. Following Taurus and Moloch, which focused on Lenin and Hitler, Sokurov’s The Sun allows us a glimpse into the final quiet moments before Hirohito, isolated in his bunker, allows General MacArthur to strip away his deity status as terms of Japan’s surrender. As Sokurov did with his insurmountable Russian Ark, he paints his Hirohito in a dreamy sepia tone where sounds such as disembodied voices, the hum of the radio and patter of feet in the bunker flutter in and out as if in a walking hallucinatory daydream. Guided only be candlelight, Ogata’s Hirohito feels in and of his time, as if that those hours of August 15th, 1945 were somehow magically encapsulated on film.
Much is made of the loss of deity status, something Hirohito is alternately ecstatic and reluctant to shed. As Sokurov follows his movements in painstaking detail, including long sequences of showing the Emperor dress, page through photos of his favorite Western actors and partake in his hobby of studying marine biology, we are given an intensely intimate as the layers of “deity emperor” are stripped away leaving only the man himself underneath. Ogata gives a masterful performance of a man under extreme duress, his lips constantly twitching and his posture one of extreme defeat as he must give up his divine status and lose ultimate face to a foreign enemy. As Hirohito recalls stories of his father, the Meiji Emperor, the shame of defeat burns through in palpable waves, even though his merely discussing a memory of a supposed show of the northern lights which should not have existed in Tokyo.
Although Hirohito’s countrymen, even the man translating for General MacArthur, refuse to see him as anything but the Emperor, he actually seems to be ready to take the heavy burden of the crown from his shoulders. In the brief 110 minutes we spend with Sokurov’s Hirohito, we see a man defeated, a man ready to rest and put the long legacy of sovereignty behind him. However, Ogata and Sokurov do not paint a man who has been crushed or cowed by his opponents. Instead, it is with quiet dignity that Hirohito abdicates, despite MacArthur’s taunts or the refusal of his countrymen to leave him in peace.
Though some may argue that MacArthur and the other Americans in this film come off as coarse and arrogant buffoons, it is important to note that the film is through the perspective of Hirohito. Who are these strange, loud and extravagant invaders who try to photograph themselves astride a crane and hand out Hershey’s chocolate like gold from a liberator? But nothing is more chilling than when MacArthur (played with slimy resolve by Robert Dawson), ready to wrest away Hirohito’s divine status, lights Hirohito’s cigar from his own. This kiss, this covenant with the Devil, may signal the end of Japan’s empirical legacy, but it also marks the liberation of Hirohito from god into mortal. As the two echo recriminations of the atrocities of Hiroshima and Pearl Harbor, there is a moment of joint understanding when both admit neither issued the order to attack. It’s this shred of shared humanism in which both men seem to realize despite their supreme power that they are nothing more than a cog in some other grand design.
by David Harris
