AKIRA KUROSAWA'S DREAMS - DVD review

As a young man, the late Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa was a fan of Hollywood Westerns, leading him eventually to base several of his most famous movies, like "The Seven Samurai" and "Yojimbo," on them, substituting Samurai warriors for Western gunfighters. Later, in a matter of art imitating art imitating art, Hollywood produced "The Magnificent Seven" and Sergio Leone made "A Fistful of Dollars" based on the aforementioned Kurosawa films, and the circle was complete.

In any case, there's no doubt Kurosawa (1910-1998) was one of the world's great directors, even influencing George Lucas's 1977 "Star War" with his 1958 film "The Hidden Fortress." To mention other Kurosawa classics would seem superfluous, but lest we forget, think also of "Rashomon," "Throne of Blood," "Heaven and Hell," "Red Beard," "Ran," and many more. By the time he got to "Dreams" in 1990, he had almost a half century of filmmaking behind him, and he had every right to coddle himself a little.

"Akira Kurosawa's Dreams" is just that: A collection of dream segments that the director claims he experienced over the years and wrote into a screenplay. As such, there's no actual story line but a series of vaguely interrelated passages. Taken as a whole they may seem somewhat disparate and unfocused, but if you begin looking at them more closely, they take on an organic structure of their own and start making sense; besides, even taken individually they are highly provocative and visually stimulating. There are eight segments in all, eight dreams, many of them aided and abetted in their special effects by George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic.

The first couple of episodes, "Sunshine Through the Rain" and "The Peach Orchard," feature the encounters of a little boy, presumably Kurosawa himself, with mystical creatures dressed in elaborate, colorful costumes. These episodes reflect the director's concern for nature, trees, animals of the forest, and so on. The imagery is striking: fields of blossoming flowers, valleys and rainbows worthy of "The Wizard of Oz," exquisite figurine dolls, and graceful processions and dances that get progressively more spectacular. These are displays any Hollywood extravaganza would envy, yet they're poignant and thought-provoking as well.

The third and fourth episodes, "The Blizzard" and "The Tunnel," are in direct contrast to the splashy hues of the foregoing segments. Three and Four are grim and bleak, meditations on death, war, and destruction, the former recounting the exploits of dying men on a mountain-climbing expedition, the latter about a ghostly battalion of dead soldiers.

The fifth episode is my favorite, "Crows," wherein an art museum patron literally steps into a painting by Vincent Van Gogh and goes looking for the artist. As a lark, director Martin Scorsese plays Van Gogh, which is neither here nor there, but he should not give up his day job. In any case, this is one of the most beautiful and fanciful bits in the movie, the Van Gogh character voicing some artistic sentiment clearly reflective of Kurosawa.

Episodes six and seven, "Mt. Fuji in Red" and "The Weeping Demon," take us back into the dark side of things by creating hellish nightmare worlds that warn against the dangers of modern nuclear technology, warfare, and devastation. These segments are more in the nature of vintage Kurosawa and again in stark contrast to the film's more colorful and picturesque scenes.

But after the admonitions of imminent disaster, the movie ends on a note of relative calm with "Village of the Watermills," the writer-director leaving us with the hope of peace and tranquillity if we would but embrace the simple life. It is close to a paradise he describes in this last portion of the film, but a paradise that can only be found by looking for it and working at it. There seems to be a bit of Thoreau implicit here: "Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!" Good advice 150 years ago and good advice today. It is a fitting conclusion to a contemplative film of frequently awesome beauty and spectacle.

Video:
Appropriate to the showy splendor of many of the episodes, the film's colors are brilliant and alive in an anamorphic widescreen transfer that measures a ratio of about 1.74:1 across a normal television. However, the picture's delineation is not always perfect, leaving a small degree of blurriness across the screen as well as a bit of roughness around the edges of many images. Together with some wavering lines, some overly dark indoor scenes, and just a hint of grain from time to time, I'd have to say the video quality is good but not topflight.

Audio:
The Dolby Stereo Surround does a respectable job in the front speakers, conveying a fairly wide spread across the listening area. But the front center channel still gets the bulk of the signal, nor is there a lot of rear-channel information being fed to the back speakers. Loud voices sometimes echo in the rear and torrents of wind are heard from behind us in the storm segment, but that's about all. Add in a touch of hardness to the sound, a limited frequency response at the top and bottom ends, and a hint of background noise at louder levels, and you get workaday audio reproduction.

Extras:
Warner Bros. are fairly skimpy on the extras here. I've watched some excellent documentaries on Kurosawa that WB might have sought out and included, but didn't. Instead, all we get are a few director film highlights, a cast and crew listing, an itemizing of awards, and thirty-one scene selections. Japanese is the only spoken language provided, but there are subtitles in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Thai, and Korean. Oddly, the English subtitles were slightly obscured on the left-hand side of the screen for the film's first couple of minutes, but the problem soon cleared up. Can't say what was happening; just one of those things, I guess.

Parting Thoughts:
Don't expect traditional storytelling from "Dreams." The various segments are what they are, snippets of dreams. They are short, most often undeveloped vignettes; brief, moral tales emphasizing visual splendor, imagery, and imagination over conventional characterization and narrative.

"Akira Kurosawa's Dreams" may never be ranked among the director's greatest epics, but it is surely one of his most personal films. It may seem self-indulgent to many viewers and admittedly it has its ups and downs, tending to drag in places. But its overall effect is a balm to the senses. It is a fascinating and, in its own way, daring piece of filmmaking from a fascinating and daring filmmaker, who in his later years was able to thumb his nose at critics and make the films that he wanted to make. More power to him.