SCANDAL (SHUBUN) (director/writer: Akira Kurosawa; screenwriter: Ryuzo Kikushima; cinematographer: Toshio Ubukata; cast: Toshirô Mifune (Ichiro Aoye), Takashi Shimura (Hiruta), Yôko Katsuragi (Masako, Hiruta's daughter), Yoshiko Yamaguchi (Miyako Saijo), Eitarô Ozawa (Hori); Runtime: 104; 1950-Japan)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
This is an awkward comedy made just before Kurosawa's breakthrough film, Rashomon. It was released in the West 30 years later. It is about a headstrong young artist, Ichiro Aoye (Mifune), who is painting in a remote mountain vacation spot, as three peasant bystanders look over his shoulder and he explains to them how his art comes from what he feels inside. He has a chance encounter with an attractive, demure, famous concert singer, Miyako Saijo (Yamaguchi), who approaches the men and tells them she missed her bus. When told that she has to walk two miles to town, she accepts a ride on Mifune's motorbike and checks into the same hotel he is staying at. Before he leaves the mountain spot, he finishes painting, now changing the color of the mountain to red, feeling inspired by her presence.
At the hotel, he innocently comes into her room dressed in a bathrobe to talk with her and when they step out on the balcony, a scandal tabloid magazine, Amour, takes a compromising photo of them standing together, both in bathrobes, and then the tabloid writes a false story saying they are lovers.
Mifune is indignant that the scandal magazine refuses to retract their story, and is not pleased with the publicity, even though his art exhibition is now well attended. The moralistic artist decides to sue the magazine and its slimy pubublisher Hori (Ozawa). Saijo shuns the publicity and tells her manager she would like to cancel her next concert, even though it is sold out, because she feels bad that people are coming solely because of the scandal.
Into the picture enters a wormy lawyer, Hiruta (Shimura), and pleads with Mifune to hire him to fight for him and protect his name. Mifune's artist model can't believe he would hire a loser like him to take the case, but Mifune says, he has honest eyes.
When Mifune visits his impoverished home, he finds there is only the lawyer's angelic young daughter, Masako (Katsuragi), home in bed, as she tells him she has TB. He sees all the racing forms in the house, but is convinced that Hiruta must be a good man, because he has such a good daughter, who has probably fallen onto bad times.
But Hiruta is not reliable, as he explains himself, saying people used to take advantage of him and laugh at his weaknesses, so he now uses trickery on them and doesn't care about ethics. The film switches tracks, as the two leads are not particularly interesting types, but the flawed Hiruta makes for a more compelling story, so he becomes the main focus of the film. He turns out to be a drunk and when he visits Hori, he recognizes him for a vile person, but allows himself because of his weak character to be bought off by him.
The dying Masako suspects her father of betraying Mifune, and can't face the kind-hearted artist, knowing that her father will purposefully lose the libel suit for him. The courtroom is filled with contrivances, as the story befits a tacky soap opera. The lawyer is shown dumping the case while the villain publisher is smirking with contempt at his apparent victory and to top things off, Masako dies and her last words are for her father to win the case for Mifune. You can't beat that for pouring on the goo!
Supposedly this film is a parody of the Japanese willingness to accept America's foreign culture as theirs. Therefore the Christmas music, such as Silent Night, is played as the trial takes place during that season, emphasizing how after Japan's defeat in the wake of World War 11, it has become completely westernized. Kurosawa cynically shows how the naive but innocent plaintiffs stand little chance in a court of law that can't look at them and know that they are innocent, as even the courtroom has become Americanized.
Kurosawa is an overrated director outside of shooting an action film, who can't shoot a dramatic film without laying on an overdose of goo. Here he has Mifune and the concert singer become sexless, while the publisher becomes a stock cardboard villain, and the lawyer's fall and redemption are just too predictable to have any effect. There is something caustic in this story, but its overall effect is ruined by too much that is an obvious delineation of what is good and evil. The immoral lawyer can be redeemed according to Kurosawa because he has a goodness in him and is not an evil man, he is just a weak man, while the innocent couple are the soul of Japan and that must never be lost sight of. I found the message awkwardly delivered and unconvincing, and the acting was especially bad, as the lines as rendered seemed to be mechanical and not instinctive, it was as if all the actors attended a school for bad actors and learned to act by being didactic. This film hardly had a pulse, just a message it kept sending out in a not too subtle way.
REVIEWED ON 8/27/2000 GRADE: C
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
ozus@sover.net
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