The Sun (Aleksandr Sokurov, 2005): Russia

Reviewed by Colin Marshall. Viewed at the Laemmle Music Hall 3, Los Angeles, CA.

The Sun, which in most senses counts as a World War II film, may well be the first to recreate that event primarily with sound. Or at least it recreates the twilight of the Japan-United States conflict, when MacArthur’s crew rolled literally up to Hirohito’s doorstep and declared occupation. Indeed, Sokurov’s film rarely moves far beyond that doorstep, preferring to concentrate on the eccentric living god’s immediate surroundings as the drizzle grows heavier, the buzz of overhead warplanes grows louder and the soldiers’ uniforms grow shabbier.

For this film’s Hirohito (as portrayed by the strangely protean Issey Ogata), the whole living-god thing turns out to be more an irritant than an honor. From the opening he argues to his remaining attendants, sometimes obliquely and sometimes directly, that his body differs not at all from that of a “mere” mortal. His coterie won’t hear of it, but Hirohito serenely states and restates his point, floating through his usual hyperscheduled routine of meals, meetings, marine biology research sessions and “time for private thought,” even as the front grinds ever closer.

Despite this dire situation’s ostensible ideological charge, Sokurov meditates on the human to the near-total exclusion of the political, a choice which has drawn some critical fire. But I, no big advocate of the further entanglement of art and politics, find that the filmmaker’s narrowed purview works almost entirely to the good. The Sun is, in a broad sense, a film “about” World War II, but it’s more importantly a film of the super-fine-grained details of a deified man’s non-relationship to his desperate inner circle and, ultimately, to the outside world that breaches his dynastic bubble.

The most visible probe comes in the form of General MacArthur himself, presented as a benevolent hulk, a stern yet doughy figure of hard authority who insists on a one-on-one dinner audience with the conquered monarch over whom he towers. Though this meeting doesn’t dominate the runtime, it feels — perhaps due to the measured buildup, perhaps due to the spectacle of these characters who might as well be space aliens to one another attempting to connect — as if it dominates the film. MacArthur, every inch the disappointed father at the head of the table — and in this case, literally at the head of the table — treats Hirohito like a spoiled child who knows not what he does. At this point in the film, we could be forgiven for thinking the same of this twitchy middle-aged eccentric who never learned to open doors for himself and insisted, not long before, that his country’s hopless battle continue to the grim end.

But the Hirohito of Sokurov’s vision isn’t so much heedless of the rest of humanity as simply incapable of engaging with it. Enraptured with the formaldehyde-soaked crabs he studies, he sees his wife perhaps once every few months; his son, barely at all. His many lines, even when spoken toward another character, never read as actually directed to the external world. Hirohito often speaks, but he leaves no doubt that even what comes between his cryptic parables and recitations of verse is meant only for himself.

Alongside its blueish, somewhat televisual video cinematography and constant low-level score of the mounting chaos without and the beeps of vintage electronic communication gear within, its central character’s unbridgeable distance from the human race gives the experience a eerie chill. But then, this is a film which delivers its greatest impacts with tics, gestures and buzzes, where an atom bomb’s devastation exists as nothing more than an offhand reference.