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The thread that ties together the eight vignettes in Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams is his cinematic surrogate, often wearing his trademark hat. Like any anthology film, Dreams is only as good as any individual segment. While others sparked my engagement more, the ending results is still like that of Kurosawa making eight different arty short films and gifting us with the wide range of his imagination.
This surrogate is often as passive witness to the actions, and only occasionally an active participant. The autobiographical and the folkloric or socio-political, sometimes all of the above, blend together in ways that are sometimes baffling but more often beautiful. “Sunshine Through the Rain” and “The Peach Orchard” display a flare for the personal as projected through a grandly theatrical lens. “Sunshine,” in particular, is one that lasts in the mind for its élan in demonstrating a wedding procession of fox spirits in real time and proudly artificial in its purely cinematic grandiosity.
Some of the more overtly political get too prosaic for me, like “The Blizzard” and its tale of humanity’s struggle with nature’s hostility and indifference to our suffering. I enjoyed when Mieko Harada showed up as the personification of the blizzard and acted as a tormenting siren, but I found it one that needed to be worked through more than engaging. A similar thing happened with “Mount Fuji in Red” where I enjoyed the lo-fi special effects work but found the overall tone of it vaguely hysterical even if I found myself agreeing with the wider message.
“The Weeping Demon” picks up where “Mount Fuji” leaves off as Japan has now become an irradiated wasteland populated by mutated millionaires and politicians being punished for their actions in a karmic realignment. This segment is fascinating for the ways in which it marries the personal, political, and folkloric into a successful and unnerving spectacle of horned demons bathing in blood-like fluids and surrounded by enormous dandelions. Kurosawa’s proxy terrified exit from the narrative is a mysterious descent into the depths. Depths of the psyche or man’s ability to wreak carnage? Probably somewhere between the two.
“Crows” finds the Kurosawa stand-in literally diving into the works of Vincent van Gogh and eventually meeting the artist, played here by Martin Scorsese. It’s an imagined meeting that finds two obsessive visualists having a meeting of the minds as van Gogh’s declarations of being devoured by his art and the rejuvenating powers of the sun feel like Kurosawa projecting his own ideas upon the famous painter. If Dreams provides a clearer glimpse of the towering cinematic artist, then it is most nakedly candid here as Kurosawa gets lost in the works of others only to become his own artist. He turns his own psyche into a blank screen to project various rummaging thoughts, and manages to make something at once deeply personal, painterly, and universal.
