#post-war cinema

[thekurosawaproject]

A pair of stills from "One Wonderful Sunday," Kurosawa's second post-war release. A great film, showcasing AK's more sentimental tendencies. Like the similarly underrated, little seen "Scandal," this film shows a Capraesque streak that became increasingly rare as Kurosawa's career progressed, and his films became more intellectual and cynical. 

[threetorches-blog]

Japanese Post-War Hamlet

The Bad Sleep Well (1960) - Dir. Akira Kurosawa

There are plenty of Hamlet adaptations out there, vaulting over language and cultural barriers to produce films that vary along the spectrum of 'faithful' and 'loose' reinterpretations of Shakespeare (let's all remember Disney's beloved The Lion King (1994)). Critically acclaimed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa returns three years after his previous foray into Shakespearean territory, the 1957 film Throne of Blood that moves from Macbeth. In The Bad Sleep Well, with our Hamlet-figure Nishi struggling to avenge his father who perished in the wake of institutionalized corruption, Kurosawa takes what rings the loudest in Shakespeare's original play and applies that to pre-WWII urban Japan. In making the case that his film effectively uses the Elizabethan play as a launching point to critique the inner rot of corporate practice, I will emphasize the suitability of Hamlet themes in Kurosawa's film setting.

The Bad Sleep Well only has its roots in Shakespeare and does not repeat the original play verbatim. Its post-war production highlights a fixation on Japanese involvement in the second world war, given the film's setting in 1935 during Japanese imperial exploits in North-East Asia. This specific time and space therefore points at a concern with the motives for the Japanese, and perhaps what may have been driving the engine of the war machine. Against a background of other contemporary Japanese films such as Gomikawa's epic trilogy The Human Condition (1959-61) The Bad Sleep Well is referred to by critics as a 'social problem' film that examines what processes may have given rise to Japan's military aggression and the terrible price it paid. 

To quickly summarize the plot, the film begins with Yoshiko, the crippled daughter of Vice President Iwabuchi of the Public Land Development Corporation, marrying Nichi, the president's secretary. The wedding is interrupted by the police who arrest Wada, one of the corporation's elder members, for charges of bribery in a kickback scheme. To the pack of journalists observing the high-profile ceremony, the incident evokes an earlier scandal that also involved Iwabuchi and his upper-level colleagues Moriyama and Shirai. The supposed suicide of the chief officer Furayama from the corporation's headquarters had halted the investigation process, leaving no evidence to implicate the higher officials. This leads to a mass silence amongst those like Wada who are arrested; many of the bureaucrats involved commit suicide in order to shield their superiors with their silence. Wada almost subjects himself to the same systemic ritual, yet is unsuccessful when Nishi catches him in the act. 

Conveying himself as simply someone trying to combat corporate corruption, Nishi plays stagemanger and uses the supposedly dead Wada to pit the guilty officers against one another, framing Shirai in the eyes of his colleagues and fostering mass distrust. In the process of squeezing out confessions from them, Nishi reveals his connection as illegitimate son to the now dead Furuya, and his plans to avenge him. In managing to track down with his close friend Itakura the evidence needed to judicially implicate Iwabuchi and his cronies, Nishi is outmatched and disposed, and the bureaucrats remain safe in knowing that those with the evidence are gone, and those who know of the crime have no evidence.

In revolving around the famous line from the soldier Marcellus in the original play "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark" the film makes it clear upfront that it is addressing an internal failure within the system. Nishi's mission is thus two-fold: revenge and combating this inner rot. This is not a significant departure from Hamlet; what does count is the fact that many more characters in As The Bad Sleep Well know of Nishi's end goals, unlike his Renaissance counterpart who largely bears the heavy burden himself and as a result gives the impression - and arguably fulfills this image - that he is going mad. 

Nishi himself is extremely composed and seems to orchestrate his meticulous manipulation without much open reflectionand debate. Instead of mourning and being visibly struck by grief and anger, Nishi represents the cool and level-headed protagonist of film noir plots and is a swiftly efficient engineer. In manipulating the top corporate officials and planting mistrust into their minds, Nishi only hesitates on one major point: he refuses to kill them. One shouldn't see this as an aversion to death though, for Nishi even takes the bureaucrats to the very same place where his own father had been pushed or allegedly committed suicide, wanting his enemies to do the same. Otherwise he is much more committed than Hamlet, not needing Furuya's ghost to inform him of foul play but instead discovering it himself in a Mousetrap moment at the beginning of the film, with the mysterious delivery of a giant wedding cake in the shape of the corporate headquarters. The reactions from the corporate bigwigs are all he needs.

Nishi shouldn't be seen as a flawless character though. His marriage to Yoshiko that begins the film is controversial, both to viewers as well as multiple characters, including her concerned brother Tatsuo who suspected from the beginning that Nishi was a careerist and only married his crippled sister in order to rise through corporate ranks. Meanwhile Wada, who plays a central role in Nishi's scheme to manipulate the guilty corporate heads, implores the protagonist that he should reconsider his actions and his desire to murder his wife's father. To me this is a very appropriate consideration for a post-war film depicting pre-war circumstances, for The Bad Sleep Well prompts us to ask whether Nishi's ends justify his means. The corrupt bureaucratic system he is challenging pits man against man in order to preserve its existence, and Nishi too falls into similar step and does not hold back from using everyone around him. He tries hard to differentiate himself in his methods, knowing that to combat the crass vulgarity of the system on its own terms is to preserve the very decay he hates and wants to publicly expose. Nishi is very focused on this revelatory element, announcing that once he delivers his argument and presents his evidence he shall turn himself in, considering his questionable methods such as blackmail and bribery. This successfully highlights a brutal reality: Nishi cannot dismantle the system and escape with an intact life. In the film's conclusion he does neither, and the only one left standing is Itakura who is left powerless with the same burden as Horatio: tell the story.

Why then turn to Shakespeare? Why look back four centuries to present a story in the 20th century, in a radically different environment from the Elizabethan England? Adaptation can take the powerful themes, obsessions, and complexities of revenge and the human condition, and extend them far beyond the domain of the early 17th century. These largely universal underpinnings can be picked up by artists like filmmakers to tell a specific story and shed light on a specific aspect of human affairs. Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well engages in a scathing critique of the smug and self-preserving system of Japan's corrupt bureaucracy, one that takes uses Shakespeare's play as an effective launching point to highlight the dangerous path that the state had stepped onto during the pre-World War years.