Movies
Rhapsody in August
Kurosawa's Indian summer lingers on, a little drowsier than before. In truth, the best manifestation of his famous intransigence is his lack of compulsion to be scintillating, his lack of fear of being dull. Four undifferentiated schoolchildren on summer holiday (their T-shirts -- USC Trojans, New York Mets, M.I.T. -- establish the period) are visiting their grandmother, a survivor of the bomb over Nagasaki, and are rousting the ghosts and skeletons of August 9, 1945: the twisted, slanted jungle gym at the school where Grandpa died, two charred cedars in the woods, a garden of commemorative sculptures donated by foreign nations ("I don't see one from America"). Richard Gere, as a long-lost Japanese-American relative from a Hawaiian pineapple ranch, pays a diplomatic call on the forty-fifth anniversary, and the effort to speak in Japanese holds down his customary twitch-and-twinkle. The interest is more documentary than dramatic, and not really a lot of either. 1991.
Reader Rating:
MPAA Rating: PG
