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Rating: In the rural Japanese countryside near Nagasaki, the summer holidays take place at the grandmother's house for four children whose parents have left for Honolulu to visit a dying and, above all, wealthy uncle. The elderly woman, called Kane, is a survivor of the atomic bomb massacre and is driven by a deep love for her grandchildren. They come to learn about the great tragedy that struck Japan on August 9, 1945, through their grandmother's stories mixed with family tales and suggestive narratives with a mystical aura. The arrival of Clark, the son of the dying uncle and now completely American, will disturb the family balance, amid misunderstandings and hidden truths. The news of the Hawaiian relative's death instills in the woman an immense sense of guilt for not being able to see him one last time, a burden on her conscience that will drive her to madness.
The penultimate work of the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, "Rhapsody in August" dates back to 1991. It's a twilight work that suffers from all the flaws of being such: resurrecting themes already previously addressed and narrated with the tones that have always characterized his cinema. Furthermore, the film was subjected to harsh criticism from some critics who reproached Kurosawa for dangerously leaning towards increasingly westernized criteria of artistic production. Excessive criticisms, mostly driven by a downgrading of the film to merely a commemoration of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki massacre.
The sequences showing the young protagonists visiting the ruins of Nagasaki and being moved in front of the monument honoring the victims of a school (Among whom was their teacher grandfather) cannot be interpreted from a unilateral perspective. The tribute is there, but not only that. The war episode is the thread connecting the characters, who are bound by relationships paralyzed by the shame of war responsibilities: the American grandson, Clark, is completely unaware that his uncle died due to the atomic bomb, an aspect hidden by the parents of the children visiting Hawaii to avoid jeopardizing their economic interests out of fear that this truth might induce remorse in the American relatives.
The contrast between the grandmother's intact goodness and her children's petty opportunism, the generational contrast essentially constitutes another fundamental theme of the film. An irreparable rift divides the members of those generations who witnessed the horrors of war from those born in the "comfortable" rebuilt world. A division that will never reach a point of convergence, as suggested by the effective and simple scene of the grandmother's reproof against the greedy gentlemen, awaiting salvation from their U.S. kin. Only the four children seem capable of opening their ears to a different viewpoint, and they undergo a gradual evolution from the beginning to the end of the film, developing a more reverent and affectionate attitude towards their ancestor, forming a united front against the "adults". It's pointless to deny the similarities with Bergman or Antonioni regarding the incommunicability at the heart of human relationships.
The final part of the film decisively veers towards the dreamlike path justified by Kane's madness, the true great protagonist of the story: everything depends on her forgiveness and her words. A character masterfully portrayed by Sashiko Murase, balancing between the difficulty of living with her memories in her old age and the tension toward belief in the supernatural. She is the protagonist of the film's most touching scenes, especially in the epilogue, when in a delirium, she confuses a thunderstorm with the bombing she lived through and rushes to cover her grandchildren with sheets, and at the end, when she desperately runs towards the city of Nagasaki pursued by her grandchildren.
There's little anti-Americanism in "Rhapsody in August", there's only a necessary highlighting of the event to urge the U.S.A. not to hide anymore but to admit guilt, forgiven by virtue of the idea that it's the war that harms, not men, nothing more than victims. Becoming aware of what happened because "They said they dropped the bomb to stop the war. Fifty years have passed, and the bomb continues its war, and not a day goes by that it doesn't kill again", as Kane says. A poem about human relationships and the consequences inflicted on them by war and also, despite malicious criticism, an invitation with a vague nationalistic flavor for the Japanese not to forget the sacredness and importance of family values and ever-valid traditions.
P.S.: the Italian dubbing is unfortunate, especially for Richard Gere, in the unlikely role of Clark.
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