Translated material
Our Emperor's Army
Clint Eastwood's new film at the Berlin Film Festival
Yesterday the European premiere of Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima took place in Berlin. Since its release (the film was first released in Japan and became the box office leader there), Eastwood managed to receive a Golden Globe for best non-English language film. The film was nominated for an Oscar in four categories and received numerous critical acclaim. However, in this case, their reason lies more in the nobility of the idea than in the merits of the “Letters.”76-year-old Clint Eastwood came up with a really great idea. While filming the patriotic Flags of Our Fathers, which tells the story of the American landing on the island of Iwo Jima in 1945, the director, by his own admission, felt a vague dissatisfaction with the blatant one-sidedness of the war genre. And so a double film was born, filmed with Japanese actors and in Japanese, in which the army of the emperor is the most “ours”, and the Americans are countless and indistinguishable enemies, all, as usual, on the same page. face. There is not much of the war itself in this almost black and white film, as if covered with volcanic dust. And the main action is the lost wandering of Japanese soldiers through fortified caves, where they methodically commit suicide or die in the flames of American flamethrowers.
From the twenty thousand soldiers who defended Iwo Jima, Eastwood chose three main characters - General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, who leads the defense of the island, the aristocrat Nishi, whose finest hour was winning the horse race at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1932, and the unlucky baker Saigo, who dreams only of to return home and see my newborn daughter. Perhaps only Saigo's story does not look flat, and in the flashback telling how he was drafted, the best line of the film is heard, addressed to his wife: “Congratulations, your husband is going to war.”
But, alas, the directorial wisdom and skill that Eastwood demonstrated in Million Dollar Baby is nowhere to be found in Letters. The computer-generated American ships look ridiculous, the night scenes are clearly filmed on a soundstage and it’s impossible to hide it, the flashbacks are illustrative, the anti-war pathos is too obvious to last for two and a half hours. In general, all this somewhat reminded me of VGIK coursework by students from friendly “third world” countries. Such a student arrives, say, from Vietnam or Burkina Faso, and the teacher tells him to film Chekhov’s story “The Smart Janitor.” The warehouse student parses the text, works, tries his best, tries to explain his concept to the Russian actors, drags a heavy chest of drawers and a couple of samovars into the pavilion. It turns out, as a rule, quite well, honestly, well, but it still looks a little wild. The student is not to blame, Eastwood is not to blame. It’s just that, as the aforementioned Chekhov’s hero said, “your brother doesn’t have a real point.”