DR. AKAGI (1998)
3 out of ****
Starring Akira Emoto, Kumiko Aso, Juro Kara, Masanori Sera, Jacques Gamblin, Keiko Matsuzaka; Directed by Shohei Imamura; Written by Imamura and Daisuke Tengan, from a novel by Ango Sakaguchi; Cinematography by Shigeru Komatsubara
DR. AKAGI--a farcical tragedy about (in no particular order) a blue whale, grave-robbing, a nuclear bomb, hepatitis, a Dutch spy, a morphine addict, a microscope, an arc lamp, a bayonet-wielding granny, and the fate of virgin boys in battle--is reputedly the final film by the great Japanese director Shohei Imamura. If so, he goes out with a bang--not that a whimper was ever likely. It is not his definitive work, but it is representative of his vision of human life as anarchic, fertile, harsh, communal, bawdy, and, above all, resilient.
World War II is nearing its end. The small Japanese town of Hibi is not what you would call strategically important, and it experiences the war at a distance, in radio broadcasts and air-raid sirens. But the psychic stresses the community feels are no less painful, and the people of Hibi mostly cope by means of the usual opiates--sex, drugs, alcohol--but while the opiates are usual, the people are not, including a drunken priest, a cynical morphine-addicted doctor, a prostitute-turned-doctor's-assistant (latest in a long line of pragmatic, carnal, emotive Imamura heroines), and so on. They are vividly portrayed, in the round, and the anguished sense that they use their vices as desperate survival strategies, as ways of both coping with and escaping from war-time reality, is moving.
Then there is Dr. Akagi, who stands apart. Our first sight of him is revealing. He is running, as he often does, from one patient's home to the next. He is immaculate and comic in a pristine white suit and shirt, knee-length black stockings and bow-tie, legs pumping furiously as a jaunty jazz theme plays on the soundtrack. The mock pomposity of this first impression is apt: there is something both absurd and admirable about Akagi, in his futile devotion and his fruitless heroics.
A middle-aged widower with a son serving in the army, he is unsparing of himself in his attention to his patients, but he also diagnoses all of them with hepatitis, and is affectionately mocked as a charlatan and "Dr. Liver." Nevertheless, he is beloved. He never seems to heal anyone, but he persists: if he did not, he might have to think about his son, his wife, the war, things for which there is no diagnosis, no prescription.
He is fond of telling anyone who will listen that hepatitis will be the next epidemic to sweep Japan, if preventive measures are not taken. It soon becomes clear that while Akagi truly believes he is talking about swollen livers, what the film is talking about is something else. Hepatitis is what happens when the body can no longer process its toxins properly, and, metaphorically, that is what is happening to Japan: destructive energies are not being contained, but are running rampant through the country, manifest as participation in the war. Every patient whom we see Akagi treat is treated for hepatitis (except, significantly, his one foreign patient), but what he is really trying--and failing--to treat is the underlying sickness of Japanese society.
When the nuclear bombs fall, in the end, as they must, it is the ultimate symptom of the sickness. The bomb may be dropped by America, but the blame, in DR. AKAGI, must be shouldered by Japan: the nuclear attack is the fatal consequence of the disease of war, the disease Japan refused to treat. It is a harsh message, and beneath the vital profuse energy that fuels the film, there is anger and sadness: anger that no one cured the sickness, sadness because maybe it couldn't be cured anyway.
DR. AKAGI is a busy movie: there's a lot going on, a lot of people, a lot of plots. It tries, with considerable gusto, to bring life to each character, each story, but it takes on too much. It is crammed full of life, only to become something of a mess. Perhaps that is the necessary price of any attempt to show life as chaotic and haphazard, but in DR. AKAGI the disordered shapelessness of the film almost cripples its central thrust.
Then there is the ending, which, despite its uneven execution, is laudable for its audacity, and memorable. While his earlier (and better) BLACK RAIN was an unusually sober and gravely respectful look at the aftermath of the nuclear bombing, Imamura here frames a response to the bombing that is characteristic of his work as a whole. He provokes a sense both of pathos and preposterousness, as his characters look upon the rising mushroom cloud and discuss it in terms that are utterly banal and wildly inappropriate. He strives to wed the sublime to the ridiculous, but some risible special effects disrupt the complex discordance of tone, the attempt to shape the conflicted impulses of the film into something great. It is an attempt that fails, but not by much.
Subjective Camera: Movie Reviews by David Dalgleish
subjective.freeservers.com
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