Rhapsody in August : No Swords, No Screams

I admit it. I got a little scared when I saw Richard Gere's name in the opening credits of Rhapsody in August, Akira Kurosawa's final film released in the U.S. (1992)

Richard Gere? Oh, please!

But then the little angel on my shoulder, who seemed to have taken on a slight Japanese accent, whispered that I must be patient and trust that Kurosawa, one of the greatest directors of all time, would not let me down. And of course, he did not.

Not your typical Kurosawa "epic," (The Seven Samurai, Ran, Rashomon) Rhapsody in August unfolds its story slowly, almost delicately.

Four young teenage cousins are staying with their grandmother Kane (Sachiko Murase) in Nagasaki for the summer, while their parents are in Hawaii with Kane's estranged, wealthy brother who is on his deathbed and calling for a reconciliation.

Between listening to the memories of their grandmother recalling the death of her schoolteacher husband in the bombing of Nagasaki forty-five summers earlier, and seeing for themselves some of the preserved remnants of that disaster, the children react as children do -- quickly and without reservation. They are no longer interested in meeting their dying great-uncle, nor his Japanese-American son Clark (Gere) because they are Americans, and Americans were the enemy who did this terrible thing to their grandparents. The kids' feelings are both strong and without gradation.

Throughout this film, which Kurosawa himself called a minor one, his early training as a painter is clearly evident. Many scenes stand alone as gentle tableaux, created with an artist's eye for composition and color. Two images in particular stood out to me: a twisted jungle gym left as a memorial at the school where the grandfather taught and died that was melted into a grotesquely graceful sculpture by the heat of the bomb blast, and a pair of ancient lightening-struck trees which stand forever-entwined on a mountainside.

It has been said that Kurosawa storyboarded his films as full-scale paintings. If that is true, I would give anything to own one of those paintings.

Eventually the parents of the children return, hoping to convince Kane to come back to Hawaii with them to see her brother before he dies. The generational differences are particularly well-drawn: the grandmother and the children seem to share an emotional purity which the middle generation, full of alcoholic scheming and political maneuvering within the extended family, have lost.

Surprisingly enough, when Gere finally appears near the end of the film as the Amer-Asian nephew of the old woman, he does not seem out of place. Although he is depicted as Americans often are in Asian cinema: large, smiling, and almost childishly affable, the character is polite and endearing. His relationship with both his aunt and cousins is almost instantaneously close, and when he apologizes to the old woman for what happened to her and her family forty-five years ago, she voices the sentiment for which Kurosawa was trounced by Japanese critics: America, she says, is not the enemy; war is the enemy.

As far as I am concerned, Rhapsody in August could be shown simply as a slide-show, one beautiful haunting image after another, and still achieve far greater than "minor" status. That this film also manages to deliver a profound anti-war message without assigning blame or showing nationalist rancor, is beyond what even the angel on my shoulder promised.