The Sun (2005)
Directed by Aleksandr Sokurov
A re-imagination of Japanese Emperor Hirohito’s final days in power as WWII draws to a close.
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Exciting, stimulating, and thoughtful, this part of the film is enlivened by an energetic, wily performance by Issey Ogata (Alexander Sokurov’s The Sun) as the government’s inquisitor, who is in charge of forcing Christians to renounce their religion.
There’s a certain poetry in having Ogata, who so brilliantly portrayed Emperor Hirohito in Aleksandr Sokurov’s The Sun, play a man whose aim is the renunciation of divinity, and Inoue is one of the great cinematic devil’s advocates in recent memory precisely because the film doesn’t present his arguments as devilry.
It's a sometimes unsettling balance: Ogata is something of a Japanese thespian legend – he played Emperor Hirohito in Alexander Sokurov 's The Sun, too– who’s as much famed as a comedian, and he manages occasionally disarming comic effects here.
Even viewers who recognize Ogata from Edward Yang’s “Yi Yi” and Alexander Sokurov’s “The Sun” will be unprepared for the bracing dose of camp he injects into these severe proceedings, with his mock formality and an unnervingly high vocal pitch that suggests a Nipponese Mr. Woodchuck.
Ogata made for a memorably eccentric Hirohito in the Alexander Sokurov film "The Sun" and if he weren't in "Silence," well, "Silence" would be even more daunting and difficult than it is.
He is certainly drawn to them: “Moloch” (1999) is about Hitler and Goebbels, “Telets” (2001) is about Lenin, and “The Sun” (2005) is about Emperor Hirohito.
This is surely not true, but Sokurov has a tradition of ascribing odd motives to dead dictators in such solemn historical burlesques as The Sun (about Hirohito) and Moloch (whose protagonist, Hitler, has an archival-film cameo in Francofonia, touring Paris after its fall).
Few directors have attempted to probe, even transgress the boundaries of technology and visuality as Lynch does here, and even those who have — like Sokurov in last year’s The Sun — have seldom done so in such an aggressive and systematic manner.
The screenplay by Yuri Arabov ("Mother and Son," "Taurus") and Jeremy Noble (writer) starts like "Downfall" then metamorphoses into something lighter and airy.