Kuroi ame

Shohei Imamura (1989)

It begins in Hiroshima on 6 August 1945.  It then moves forward to the 1950s to describe – with a couple of flashbacks to events later on the day the atomic bomb was dropped and the black rain the bomb caused to fall – the afterlife of a Japanese village community, and, in particular of a man, his wife and their niece.  (It’s their experiences also, on the day of the mushroom cloud, on which Shohei Imamura focuses.)  The afterlife really does seem like an afterlife.  It’s as if the characters, while not exactly ghosts, stopped being complete human beings when the bomb exploded.   The photography makes Black Rain look genuinely contemporary with the events that it describes; the various images of dead and injured in the immediate aftermath of the bomb seem etched on the screen in a way that anticipates their becoming unforgettable.   Yet Black Rain lowers the spirits in the wrong way.  The survivors’ journey towards physical death by radiation sickness – or psychological death, resulting from a virtually cancerous guilt that they survived August 1945 – is painfully slow-moving.  This makes all the more crudely melodramatic the subplot of the ex-soldier who is so traumatised by the memory of advancing tanks that he goes crazy each time he hears the engine of an approaching motor vehicle.  Kazuo Kitamura gives a superbly controlled and convincing performance as a man quietly managing to retain his reason, while his wife succumbs to the fakery of a medium and his niece to a neurotic wasting away.   In the latter role, Yoshiko Tanaka is gravely beautiful but not sufficiently expressive to make you feel the full force of her gradual depletion.  Based on a 1966 novel by Masuji Ibuse.

9 July 2008