Skandal

I've seen dozens of films by Akira Kurosawa. Of course, I hunted down the films that have made him famous first - films like Sanjuro, Yojimbo, and the Seven Samurai. After viewing those masterpieces I moved on to his catalog of lesser-known (and much more difficult to find!) films such as this one, Shubun (Scandal).

While watching this movie I was continually amazed at how well this movie kept my interest. I firmly believe it could be presented to an audience of disinterested types and they would be quickly pulled in. It is quickly paced, competently directed, and the acting is great. Some of the early Kurosawa flicks become quite dull in spots (Ikiru), a flaw this film does not suffer from.

Toshiro Mifune (playing Ichiro Aoye), young and impossibly handsome, does not manage to steal the show in this film, as he does with nearly all of his Kurosawa rolls. In fact, Takashi Shimura gets all the juicy bits and only furthers my belief that he is among Japan's greatest screen actors.

The plot goes all over the map, taking us from lighthearted moments to some excruciatingly tragic affairs. These are not terms I throw around without hesitation...you WILL be moved.

The icing on the cake: a vile villian, one of the nastiest characters you'll ever see in a Kurosawa film and the strikingly beautiful Shirley Yamaguchi who plays the pop singer, Mikako Saijo (with whom Mifune's Aoye is caught in a tabloid scandal with).

This film has recently been released on video with new subtitles and it most certainly worth hunting down.

Akira Kurosawa has now become one of my favourite directors. Even in some of his weaker films like Dreams and Rhapsody in August there is much to like. All his films are beautifully made and directed, with complex and humanistic characters and themes, fine music and great acting. Scandal is not one of my favourites from Kurosawa like Seven Samurai, Ran, Hidden Fortress, Ikiru and Yojimbo, I did find some scenes like the Auld Lang Syne bar scene on the melodramatic side and I found Toshiro Mifune's performance here to be the least interesting of his I've seen so far and his character somewhat dissuasive. That is not to say at all that Mifune is bad, he is actually very good with his usual brooding persona, just that he has done characters that were more human and interesting. Besides while I have found Mifune to have stolen the films he's in before, he's outclassed by a brilliant Takashi Shimura, and Shirley Yamaguchi and Yoko Katsuragi are just as natural. Other than Shimura, Yamaguchi and Katsuragi, Scandal is made and directed with delicate skill, and the story, with quite a daring and personal subject matter, is always intense and engaging. The script is just as naturalistic and never stilted, the characters on the whole are well done especially Shimura's lawyer, the courtroom scene is compellingly played and the music while not one of the best ever scores for Kurosawa's films is fitting. All in all, not one of the master of Japanese cinema's best but still a film of interest. 8/10 Bethany Cox

Akiro Kurosawa's "Scandal" was released in 1950, the same year than "Rashomon" which makes its relative lack of fame understandable albeit unfair, because in its own modest way, "Scandal" marks a transition between Kurosawa's neo-realistic movies such as "Stray Dog" and "Drunken Angel" and international recognition. You can even feel some announcing signs of the revolution named "Rashomon"... from the very first scene.

Ichioro Aoye is painting in the mountains, watched by three rustic and colorful mountaineers who can't understand why the mount he's painting is red. Because it's moving, says Aoye. The idea that painting couldn't represent reality baffles them, foreshadowing the conflict to come. Then occurs a strange meeting with a renowned singer Miyako Sajio, played by Shirley Yamagushi. She's lost, the bus will be late, Aoye offers her a ride to the hotel on his motorbike. Later, two paparazzi from tabloid magazine "Amour" take a picture of Sajio and Aoye in a balcony.

And so begins the scandal.

At first, the film has a strange Kazanian feel reminding his films about the power of media, in one side, the offended righteous couple and opposing them, the sleazy paparazzi owner with a grin, invoking freedom of press in a media joust presented like a ping-pong montage of interviews (instead of the usual spinning headlines). There's something oddly American in this modern Japan, that went as far as adopting the standards of America such as Santa Claus, "Silent Night" and even "Auld Lang Syne". It's not much the presence of America than the loss of values and poetry Kurosawa denounces. There's something wrong indeed when people can be fooled by a static photograph but not see the poetry in a painting.

The still photo moved more than Aoie's vision of the mountain.

It's that context of twisted and distorted reality that made Japan lose its boundaries and if you look at it carefully, this is the very basis of "Rashomon", the idea that what you see, what you take for granted might only be a matter of perspective. Applying this logic to the picture, and knowing for a fact the article is a bunch of lies made to sell paper, we can't help but feel from our perspective that there's some genuine guilt within the couple, they might have fallen in love after all. It's then a matter of honor, the point is to be responsible for what you show and whether you're criticized for the way you do it is irrelevant if the intent is sincere.

Kurosawa was more celebrated outside Japan maybe because he was closer to Aioe painting his mountain, never a paparazzi forging the truth, and boy, did his pictured shake the world.

And when the media circus calms down, a down-on-his-luck lawyer named Hiruta, played by Takashi Shimura, offers his help. Aioe is perplexed at first and it's only after he meets Hiruta's young tuberculous daughter Masako (Yôko Katsuragi) terminally ill, that he lets Hiruta defend him. Masako is a central character as she represents the morality, innocence and purity being lost in post-WW2 Japan, a delicate and soulful girl who sees no bad without ignoring its existence and paradoxically, she's also the trigger of her father's moral downfall as he takes bribes from the adverse party to slow the trial, needing money to cure them.

So just when we think we're having a courtroom drama, Kurosawa surprises his own audience. The narrative loses focus on the trial and turns into a character study of guilt and redemption through he overly pathetic Hiruta. Sometimes truly heartbreaking, sometimes grotesque with his constant snorting and self-loathing (he was inspired by a man Kurosawa used to encounter in a bar), sometimes even annoying with his sorry look and bent posture, it's a first taste of "Ikiru" that kind of drag down during ten minutes before the film takes its breath back.

The focus on Hiruta proves that Kurosawa doesn't care for ideas than people, it's one thing to comment on Japan's declining values but to show it through a personal tragedy is the real craft of the Master. After all, even in "Rashomon", the story would have been pointless if it wasn't for that emotional finale with the two men.

So honor, life and death have been recurring themes in all Kurosawa's filmography and the evolution and redemption of Hiruta is the soul of the film, the internal battle between principles and money. The film carries some noir undertones with journalists posing like verbal gangsters but ultimately, the film is about the way people should conduct themselves, it's about men doing their job with commitment and responsibility. "Drunken Angel" had a doctor who cared for an ill man though he was a criminal, "Stray Dog" was about a cop who lost a gun and feared the bullets would make collateral victims, "Scandal" has singers, painters, professionals who, whether lawyers or journalist, have a responsibility to face (notice that even the bad guy's lawyer is more competent and ethical than his opponent).

That responsibility is materialized in Kurosawa's camera, one picture can destroy people's lives, but in another scene, Hiruta sees the picture of his daughter before taking a bribe and can't even look straight at her. What you see can also warn you about what you are and Kurosawa painted his own truth with the empathy of a true humanist. Another example is when Hiruta comes late at home, he sees Sajio singing a Xmas song and she's framed by the door as a screen vignette within the shot, as if that moment was encapsulating his own personal alienation.

So "Scandal" is about what people perceive and how they're perceived in return, and in this overlapping of realities, somewhere the truth exists and tending to it is a moral responsibility and art is the perfect accessory as long as it's used sincerely. Indeed a fine precursor to "Rashomon", and to use a hackneyed formula, an underrated little gem.

This premiered in Japan only four months before "Rashômon" (1950), a film that marked a turn of events for Kurosawa, who, a year later in 1951, would find himself picking up the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival, his name henceforth on everyone's lips.

This marks an end of an era, then. It does pair up very well with "Yoidore tenshi" (1948) and "Nora inu" (1949), its immediate predecessors, but also with "Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru" (1960). All of these are scintillating depictions of urban Japan, but they all mark an acute sense of drama on the personal level: these are "small" films when compared to "Shichinin no samurai" (1954) and "Ran" (1985), for example, but Kurosawa, in these films, shows his strengths, and the great energetic intimacy that is prevalent in "Samurai", for example, quite possibly stems from the experience of making a film like this.

I have no idea why this is often overlooked as mere "early Kurosawa", as if that would somehow de-note a lesser film. His later masterpieces are great films, but the early films of his are amongst the most rewarding I know of. What's more, this film shares a great deal with "Rashômon" (1950) in meditating on truth and how that is and can be depicted on screen in the narrative. A brilliant film in all respects, and Mifune is as amazing as ever.

Kurosawa's Scandal is thus far my least favorite of all of his films. It tells the most kindergarten of yarns: Two celebrities accidentally meet during a holiday staying at the same hotel. In an easily misunderstood situation each other, tabloid photographers seek revenge on them for rejecting interviews by taking a picture of them and fabricating a love story about them. There is a scandal, and a lawsuit eventually battles the paparazzi. Despite Kurosawa's message pertaining to the post-war Americanization of Japan in terms of the media, could a single pop culture magazine dominate the entire media the way it's depicted to in the story?

The narrative is so clearcut and unsurprising with its message-obsessed subject, the good guys are practically perfect with complete humility and no character flaws and the bad guys are cocky jerks with no redeemable values.

It's not a terrible film, however. It is, after all, directed by Akira Kurosawa who, aside from showcasing an obvious scenario about the shrewdly dishonest media, explores the Japanese cultural perception of weakness. Weakness is something intolerable in Japanese culture, yet good enough people can understand a naturally weak person. Weakness is an organic part of someone. It comes from sensitivity, feelings of inferiority, harsh luck, all of which the character of the lawyer has, and as hard as it is for the surrounding characters to do, they understand it when he gives into weakness.

I prefer the last half of the movie by a landslide because it becomes more about the lawyer wrestling with his own guilt. It's a story that would never be found in an American film because of the cultural differences and how bound to accords the Japanese feel.