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Simply Perfect

Great Film overall

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

I found this Japanese film in the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die book, I was hoping it would be another foreign film I would never have found otherwise and was enjoyable, directed by Kon Ichikawa (An Actor's Revenge, Tokyo Olympiad). Basically, set during the Second World War, Japanese soldier Private Mizushima (Shôji Yasui) is the harp player in a group composed by Captain Inouye (Rentarô Mikuni) who raise morale for the Burma Campaign by fighting and singing. They are offering shelter in a village, eventually realising that British soldiers are watching them, with their ammunition retrieved and the forces advancing, Captain Inouye tells the men to sing, laugh and clap to trick the British into believing they are unaware of their presence, the British soldiers do not fire, they sing along, the war has ended, and the Japanese surrender to the British. As Australian captain at a camp asks Mizushima to talk down a group of soldiers still fighting on a mountain, he agrees and has 30 minutes to convince them to surrender, he is almost shot by them before they realise he is Japanese, he climbs up and informs the Defense Commander (Tatsuya Mihashi) the war is over and to surrender. But after conferring with their commander, they decide to fight to the end, even after Mizushima begs them, he asks the Australians for more time, but him creating a surrender flag is taken the wrong way and they believe he is surrendering for them, he is beaten unconscious and left on the floor, he is the only survivor following a bombardment. An Old Monk (Eiji Nakamura) helps Mizushima to recovering from his injuries, one day he steals the monk's robe and shaves his head so he will not be spotted by a soldier, he journeys to the camp where his comrades were sent, but he finds many Japanese soldiers dead on the way, he buries them. Captain Inouye and his men cling on to the belief that Mizushima is still alive, eventually the buy a parrot to speak a phrase with Mizushima's name, and an Old Woman villager (Tanie Kitabayashi) takes it to a monk they suspect is actually Mizushima in hiding, she returns with another parrot with a reply rejection phrase. The old woman also gives the captain a letter, saying that Mizushima has decided not to go back with them to Japan, because he continues to bury the dead, while studying as a monk and promoting the peaceful nature of mankind, but he states when he has finished burying the fallen soldiers, he may return to Japan. Also starring Yûnosuke Itô as Village head. I was just about able to follow the story, about the young musician/harpist renouncing his homeland to remain in Burma as a Buddhist monk during World War II, sincerity does occasionally turn into sentimentality, but there are good military and musical scenes, and more than anything this epic film has great landscapes that accompany the great music, an interesting war drama. It was nominated the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Very good!

1853. US Navyman Commodore Matthew Perry makes his way into Japan and forcibly opens the country up to international trade. After two and a half centuries of self-imposed, peaceful isolation, Japan henceforth begins emulating Western powers. After the Meiji Restorations of 1868, Japan not only conclusively shifts from a feudal society to a market economy, but embarks on an endeavour to assimilate Western ideas, technological advances and customs. To the chagrin of the Western Empires, it also spends the next few years aggressively expanding into neighbouring territories, encroaching upon Korea, Taiwan, China, Vietnam, Burma and the Philippines, all countries which had themselves been taken over by Europeans and Americans. The apple in Japan's eye is China, though, which Russia, France, Germany, England and the US are busy dividing between themselves via "Open Door Policies". These policies grant multiple international powers access to China, all to the detriment of China itself.Ticked off that the big Imperialists aren't letting Japan get down to some sweet Imperialism of its own, Japan launches the First Sino-Japanese War (1894) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904). Ironically, these expansions are funded by British and American bankers (Jacob Schiff famously provided 200 million in loans), to such an extent that Japan's outstanding foreign loan indebtedness grows from near zero in 1896 to 421 million yen in 1904 and then 2600 million yen in 1913. After about two decades of further pressure cooking, a complex cocktail of forces and/or contradictions eventually lead to all the world's major nations getting their collective grooves on. In Japan's case, a mixture of nationalism, exceptionalism, racism, stupidity, economic competition, mounting debts, the need to open up foreign markets to prevent local markets from collapsing (historial J.A Hobson would famously call capitalist oligarchy, rather than national pride, the "taproot of imperialism"), blockades, Western bullying and sheer confusion leads to a state of Total War. The end result of WW2? The two Imperialist upstarts – Japan and Germany – get bombed back to the stone age, whilst the old Imperialist Empires go broke and are forced to scale back their domains. The United States emerges as top dog.Two of the major war films in Japanese post-war cinema were "Fires on the Plain" and "The Burmese Harp", both by director Kon Ichikawa. Released in 1956, "Harp" follows Private Mizushima, a lowly member of Inouye Company. Mizushima plays a lute, whose music becomes Ichikawa's metaphor for a humanity which is suffocated during war time. The film's awash with bleak landscapes, craggy, war-torn and steeped in death, a canvas which the lute attempts to hold back with an aesthetic of its own. But it's no use. "Soil is blood-red," a title-card reads, "so are rocks.""Harp" finds Ichikawa drawing parallels between Japanese and British soldiers, the fighting class on either side identical in their humanity. Its climax points to Japanese concentration camps, the scientific barbarism of the atomic bombs and finally to monastic Buddhism, Mizushima's newfound path. It's a path which divides Mizushima from both his comrades and an increasingly secular Japan. If warfare remains the music of the gun, Mizushima's Buddhism embodies the music of the lute, an aural flame which he dedicates his life to fanning."Harp's" overriding tone is one of sadness. "Fires on the Plain" (1959), however, is suffused with blunt cruelty. It begins with a slap to the face and then the introduction of Private Tamura, a young man stationed in the Philippines. Tamura, we learn, has been ordered to kill himself with a grenade if he fails to admit himself to a hospital for healing, an absurd situation which informs the rest of Ichikawa's film. Whilst Tamura's countrymen prefer death to the dishonour of capture, Tamura rejects the nationalism and indomitable Yamato-damashii spirit of the army. He sees no dishonour in staying alive, and will do anything to survive. "Fire" thus offers the reverse of the spirituality and positive affirmation of Ichikawa's "Harp". It stresses the corporeal, the physical, its tone is nihilistic, and Tamura will cross any barrier in the name of self preservation, unlike Mizushima, who challenges himself and others to live humanely even within evil circumstances. Lost in a nightmarish odyssey, Tamura stumbles upon burning hospitals, corpses and vampire-like soldiers who cannibalise flesh, his narrative serving to undermine any measure of value or nobility wrongly ascribed to warfare. The film climaxes, in a scene evocative of Sam Fuller's "Big Red One", with Tamura shot whilst trying to surrender to an American soldier. His life's been lost for nought.Aesthetically, "Harp" and "Fire" are similar. Both are melancholic, at times shocking, and carefully juggle impressive wide screen photography with blunt close-ups of haggard faces. Both also feature dated scores, dip into excessive sentimentality and feature soldiers who are more dirty, dispirited and exhausted than was typical of Western war films of the era. This is not surprising. Before the revisionist and/or counterculture movements of the 1960s, British and American war films tended to be upbeat. Even Lewis Milestone ("All Quiet On the Western Front"), would get roped into directing gun-ho flicks ("Pork Chop Hill", "Halls of Montezuma"). Italian, Polish, French and Japanese war films, meanwhile, most of which fell under the umbrella of neorealism, operated under a completely different sensibility. Indeed, directors like Masaki Kobayashi, Andrzej Wajda and Rossellini were directing whole anti-war trilogies. 7.9/10 – Worth one viewing. See "Paths of Glory", Suleiman's "The Time that Remains" and Kobayashi's "The Human Condition".

At the end of WWII, a Japanese platoon is stationed in the jungles of Burma, who have impressive singing skills inspired by their star musician, Private Mizushima...and his harp. Mizushima becomes separated from his company and is presumed dead. Stealing the robes from a Buddhist monk who saves his life, he disguises himself to avoid suspicion as he goes in search of the British prison camp where his platoon awaits repatriation, but is unprepared for the new perspective the stolen robes provide. The initial selfish act of theft contain the seeds of the thief's selfless future. Mizushima's spiritual transformation from a fake monk, thief and soldier of war to that of a genuine bodhisattva warrior (a peaceful 'warrior' of wisdom, compassion and generosity) is reflected in a wonderful and unforgettable scene where his platoon assembles for choral practice in front of a large reclining Buddha statue. As the platoon begins to sing, they are baffled by the mysterious and beautiful harp accompaniment that seems to emanate from inside the body of the Buddha statue, where unknown to the platoon, Mizushima, who is thought to be dead, has taken refuge... and has himself become an instrument of peace.

A lesson on how NOT to make a picture by one of the most celebrated Japanese directors of all time. I have no other way of explaining the ignominious debacle that is THE BURMESE HARP. This must be Ichikawa's 110 minute masterclass on how NOT to create a story. And it's genius for that.The basis of HARP's story is another return on the widely traveled path of the Hero's Journey. The mentor, the death and resurrection of the hero, the gift he returns with from the other world to bestow upon the world, everything the respectable Joseph Campbell taught can be found here.Where the movie falters is in substituting true dramaturgy and character motivation for saccharine sentimentality. Ichikawa goes straight for the jugular, his intentions to force the drama upon the viewer's emotions instead of letting it derive naturally from the premise and the character orchestration. Conflict, the most surefooted and ancient root in the heart of all storytelling, is forced via jumps in logic or simply produced on demand when the movie requires it.After a decent first 40 minutes and an almost excellent following 30 minutes, the movie proceeds to foreshadow its calamitous conclusion by turning the protagonist, a Japanese soldier turned Buddhist monk, into a sulking child. On his way back from a mission from which he barely survived he has the opportunity to witness the ravages of war firsthand. He returns to the previously appointed gathering point for the surrendered Japanese troops a changed man. Instead of rejoining his platoon to wait for their shipping back to Japan, he runs off and hides from them. His platoon spends the rest of the movie looking out for him, cajoling him and singing when the opportunity provides. Which is pretty darn often.Why did the private run off? Something to do with the harrowing images of unburied Japanese soldiers he saw on his way we understand. Let us make a small jump in logic and assume this is the first time a soldier engaged in war comes across such horrors. What is the specific character motivation that turns him into a sulking child? We never know. Ichikawa probably doesn't either as he has the platoon break out in song every 10 minutes until the final 5 minutes of the movie where he remembers he somehow needs to explain the protagonist's irrational behaviour. At which point the sergeant produces a very convenient letter written by the private, where in, what essentially amounts to little more than a voice-over narration, we are "told" a bunch of utterly vapid and bland clichés regarding "peace", "courage" and "easing the suffering of others".All great ideas to be sure but for the love of god man!! You can't tell us these things, we know already. You have to show, invoke the images and character actions that will enable us to arrive at those selfsame conclusions. Something Ichikawa himself did with the harrowing and soul-destroying FIRES ON THE PLAIN a couple of years later. Stacked against that monumental war drama, The Burmese Harp is feeble and puny, an elegiac ode on humanism that lacks the power of conviction.The black and white cinematography is great, it is after all a visual master of Ichikawa's calibre we're talking about. Is it surprising then that the most gripping sequence of the film is almost entirely silent? Ichikawa delivered his masterpiece with Fires on the Plain and with The Burmese Harp he shows how NOT to make a movie. What else could be expected of any director?