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| Monday, July 14, 2008 12:28 PM |
| On the Viewer - The Bad Sleep Well |
 by Fëanor |
Some day, I would like to be able to say truthfully that I've seen all of Akira Kurosawa's films, but some of them are pretty hard to get your hands on. A case in point is The Bad Sleep Well, which I'd been trying to find for years when it finally turned up on Netflix one day and I triumphantly added it to the queue. I've been watching it in short spurts over the last month or so, and recently I finally finished it.
Like many of Kurosawa's films, this one stars the two great talents of Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura. The film opens at a wedding between salary man Nishi (Mifune) and the crippled daughter of the vice president of the company he works for. The VP's name is Iwabuchi, and the company is called Public Corporation. A bunch of reporters are circling the wedding like vultures, because a big controversy is erupting around the questionable relationship between Public Corporation and another company, and the reporters expect an arrest will be made soon, possibly at the wedding itself. They're right! And to make things even more juicy, the cake that gets delivered to the wedding is shaped like a building with a rose sticking out a particular window - turns out it's an image of a building Iwabuchi and two of his subordinates once worked in, and the window marked is the one that another subordinate jumped out of years ago, killing himself. As the uncomfortable wedding goes on (with a great best man speech wherein the bride's brother tells the groom to take care of her, "or I'll kill you!" - and he ain't kidding, either), and the corporate intrigue continues, what's really going on slowly becomes clear: Iwabuchi and his cronies are corrupt to the core, but to protect themselves and the good name of the company they're perfectly willing to order their subordinates to commit suicide. In fact, the man who jumped out that window years ago was talked into killing himself for similar reasons. And so far this strategy has worked for the company; the police can't get enough solid evidence to prove anything or convict anybody. But now someone is going after Iwabuchi and his friends in revenge for the death re-enacted in the wedding cake, and he's willing to go to any lengths to achieve his goal.
The opening wedding sequence is truly brilliant, and despite a few slow spots, the rest of the film is nearly as good. At first we follow the investigation from the perspective of the police, then we shift gears and see things from the perspective of the man determined to bring down Iwabuchi and his cronies - and I don't think it's much of a spoiler to tell you that the man is Nishi, or rather, a man who has taken Nishi's identity so he could marry Iwabuchi's daughter and destroy the company from the inside. As time goes on, we see deeper and deeper into Nishi's character and history and come to understand that his determination comes from guilt; that his complex relationship with Iwabuchi's daughter could be his salvation or his destruction; and that the forces arrayed against him are stronger than he could ever have imagined. The suspense builds as Nishi's activities and finally his identity are revealed to Iwabuchi and Iwabuchi's vengeful son. The end of the film is crushing and brutal, offering us hope for the future and then cruelly dashing it. The feeling conveyed is that this culture of corruption will go on, destroying people and their families for years to come. It's a scathing indictment of the entire business world, and the kind of powerful melodrama you expect from Kurosawa. I wouldn't say it's his best film, but it's certainly a very good one. |
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