DR. AKAGI
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Kino International Director: Shohei Imamura Writer: Shohei Imamura, Daisuke Tengan Cast: Akira Emoto, Kumiko Aso, Juro Kara, Masanori Sera, Jacques Gamblin, Keiko Matsuzaka, Misa Shimizu, Yukiya Kitamura, Masato Yamada, Tomoro Taguchi, Masato Ibu
If you were seriously ill, there are two physicians you'd do well to avoid: Patch Adams and Agaki Fuu. Yet the two doctors introduced to the movie public in 1998--the first by director Tom Shadyac, the latter by the great Shohei Imamura--are both treated as heroes. And they are indeed, if you discount their ability to heal. In "Patch Adams," considered by one critic to be the most vulgarly sentimental film by a major Hollywood studio since "Love Story" was offered in 1970, not one foot of film displayed the title character's actually treating an illness. "Dr. Akagi," by contrast, is brimming with shots of injections, incisions, and research with a microscope, but because its title figure administers to his patients as though they all had hepatitis, he is not likely to cure his sufferers--except perhaps metaphorically. The American doctor who to this day heads an institute in Virginia that treats patients at no charge and the Japanese practitioner whose career spanned the years of World War II have two things in common: One, they made people laugh, although Akagi's public rather snickered as he ran by and called him a quack. Two, they were more compassionate, more accepting of human frailty, than the general population. Though the characters in the Robin Williams movie are not explored in any particular depth, those in the Japanese account are surveyed perceptively. By doing this, director Imamura is able to show his audience what it means to accept humanity in all its measure.
Dr. Akagi (Akira Emoto) is a physician in a Japanese seaside community concerned with what he sees as an epidemic of hepatitis during the final months of World War II. He is nicknamed Dr. Liver by those who consider him a quack. By many definitions of that term he fits the bill by misdiagnosing most of his patients' illnesses. The 72-year old director, Shohei Imamura (whose father was a doctor), is far more attentive to Akagi's goodness, his benevolence and acceptance of the human condition. Accommodating Ango Sakaguchi's novel to the screen, Imamura presents Akagi as a man who literally runs from one emergency appointment to another, in one case leaping from his office to an island he had never heard of at the plea of a dying man's frantic daughter. His assistants are a motley crew, particularly a surgeon who is addicted to morphine, Toriumi (Masanori Sera); a priest with a taste for the bottle, Unemoto (Juro Kara); an escaped prisoner of war from the Netherlands, Piet (Jacques Gamblin); and most startling, a hooker whose mother had groomed her for the profession, Sonoko (Kumiko Aso). The dissolute members of his team agree to give up their vices, but people being what they are, they cannot. When Sonoko is asked to stop selling herself altogether, she replies that she sees men "hardly ever." For his part Toriumi swears that his relationship with morphine is that "I hardly use it anymore."
Imamura, whose recent works include a story about a paroled wife-killer whose obsessive relationship to his pet eel is not wholly explained, is not too concerned with analyzing the psychological bases of his people's demands. We do know that Akagi has intermittent nightmares that his son, a doctor at the front, is performing dire medical experiments on live subjects who have been captured by the Japanese army. This small clue is, however, the key to an understanding of the film's metaphor. Akagi appears distressed by what he considers his son's immorality and, by extension, the indecency of the Japanese fighting machine and of war itself. Humankind's addiction to conflict is like liver disease: an epidemic that spreads indiscriminately, a moral sickness which never goes away. If Akagi has no cure for hepatitis, the world has no corrective for war. While the good doctor believes in what he considers the Japanese cause--to free Asia from Western colonialism--he nonetheless fumes at the runaway nationalism that has led to armed combat. Toriumi, the drug addicted surgeon, is more cynical when he states, "To hell with Japan's future."
The prostitute Sonoko is the comic center of the movie. Played with great charm and humanity by Kumiko Aso, this doctor's assistant is not at all skeptical or negative about her trade. In her own innocent and untutored way, she loves men, and deals with her profession as quite the honorable way to support her sister and brother. When she has sex with the son of a woman who begs her to do so because that young man is going to the front and "virgins attract bullets," she can sleep soundly, knowing that she has done yet another good deed for her nation.
Exquisitely acted and photographed with a true feeling for life in a village largely untouched by Allied bombing, "Dr. Akagi" happily does not pass moral judgment on the small people with whom the movie deals but rather condemns the authoritarian government that has made wholesale slaughter inevitable.
Not Rated. Running Time: 120 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten
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