Peter Bradshaw, Friday September 2, 2005, The Guardian : Original Review

Just in time for the 60th anniversary of VJ Day comes Aleksandr Sokurov's new film: a mesmerisingly mad, brilliantly intuitive study of Emperor Hirohito and his Götterdämmerung in the days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as he is summoned to make an unthinkably humiliating account of himself by General Douglas MacArthur. It is the last panel in Sokurov's triptych of 20th-century despots - the first two being Moloch (1999), about Hitler, and Taurus (2001), about Lenin - but this, it seems to me, is the tragicomic masterpiece of the three, and certainly superior to his recent, unrewarding movie Father and Son.
The Sun shows the living god who emerges blinking into the scorched, radioactive daylight of the modern world and decides he must commit the act of hara-kiri appropriate on Mount Olympus: renounce his divinity and become a man. Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall was accused of leniency to the Führer in his bunker; Sokurov's Hirohito is never sympathetic exactly - he is just too alienated, too mysterious, the godhead who will never lower himself to the ordinary human emotions consistent with defeat, but must, through some superhuman effort of stoicism and politesse, accommodate himself to the reality of placing his head under America's yoke.

The emperor is the sun-god to his people, but over him defeat has cast a mushroom cloud. Appropriately the movie is shot throughout in crepuscular twilight, a sepia gloom for interior shots and a truly strange bleached-out blankness on the rare occasions when the emperor goes out of doors - as if the shock of defeat and nuclear catastrophe had leached all the natural light out of the world. It really is a quite extraordinary visual effect, and for a long time you watch it blinking, as if your eyes might eventually become accustomed to this subdued light.

Sokurov is both cinematographer and director, and the well-documented fact of his own failing eyesight must of course make his admirers wonder if this effect is entirely intentional. Maybe; maybe not. Common sense suggests that this problem would make his films too bright. In any case, the question itself for me lends its own aesthetic and human poignancy to the work, a sense that the director has found his own very personal, serendipitous access to the idea of failure and the withdrawal of light.

The sound design is also a thing of wonder. Almost continually under the dialogue, the score murmurs and crackles like bad radio reception, and the effect is to make the film look like a remembered nightmare or like images from another planet. It murmurs like an unquiet spirit or like the plumbing of a haunted house. With masterly control, Sokurov orchestrates passages of Bach and, inevitably, Wagner, rising and falling in the white noise of Japan's nuclear winter.

The emperor and the American general are profoundly alien to each other. Hirohito is played by Issei Ogata as part gawkish boy, part sclerotic old man, his mouth continually working in a palsied, neurotic tic, as if over ill-fitting dentures. Clothed in a western-style morning suit with tailcoat, top hat and owlish spectacles, he is forced to dine with MacArthur (Robert Dawson), who is angry, contemptuous, profoundly uncomprehending. They are like two separate species, or even separate planetary forms.
The emperor is protected from the real world in his fortified royal apartments, poring over his photo collection. He gazes glumly at one shot of Hitler and Hindenburg, perhaps realising that he personally embodies both Hitler's defeat and Hindenburg's Ruritanian obsolescence and irrelevance. Throughout Japan's disaster, he has been chiefly interested in his hobby of marine biology research (a little like George V's stamp collection) and he has vivid dreams of Japanese cities being firebombed by malign airborne fishes. His Darwinian convictions have been accelerated by defeat, leading him to "evolutionary" views about Japan's future modernity. The amateur geneticist in him senses that the history of homo sapiens will be advanced by disaster, by the comets and meteorites which will extinguish one era and usher in another. Viewing this film 60 years after its historical period, it is remarkable to think that the Japanese are still alone in experiencing nuclear attack and the evolutionary consequences it brings in its train.
A Tom Stoppard or a Ronald Harwood might well tell this story differently on the stage, perhaps clarifying its shape and putting brilliant speeches into the mouths of Hirohito and MacArthur. Sokurov prefers a cloud of unknowing and fear. Some might find the perpetual semi-darkness a difficulty and some of the dialogue uneasy. But for my money, even this is utterly appropriate. The Sun is a film about a world that has lost its bearings, an existential feeling of being unmoored from everything that had been taken for granted, cut adrift in an outer space of strangeness. Even its flaws - if they are flaws - are absorbing, and there is something exhilarating in the traumatised irrationality that Sokurov has somehow ingested into his creative procedure as a film-maker. Everything is managed with incomparable seriousness and grandeur.

Secrets of the emperor's bunker

JG Ballard applauds Alexander Sokurov's remarkable film portrait of Hirohito

Should the war against Japan ever have taken place? The surprise attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941 brought a devastating response from the United States, and turned the European war into a world-wide conflict. Sixty years after Japan capitulated, the old soldiers have marched past the Cenotaph, still proud and spry, but probably for the last time. Few of them, sadly, will parade on the 70th anniversary, though arguments about the end of the Pacific war, and whether it was right to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, will go on without them.

The debate about the end of the war against Japan obscures a more important question: why did the war begin in the first place? Was it a gigantic blunder, triggered by decisions made two years earlier by a British prime minister on the far side of the globe?

This emphasis on ends rather than beginnings can be seen in The Sun, a new film by Russian director Alexander Sokurov (best known for the acclaimed Russian Ark), and the third part in his tetralogy, following films about Hitler and Lenin, depicting crucial moments in the lives of the 20th century's most powerful men. Set in the immediate aftermath of Japan's defeat, it describes the meetings between the Emperor Hirohito and General Douglas MacArthur, the commander-in-chief of the American occupying forces.

Sokurov is a noted documentary maker, and The Sun resembles a dream-like newsreel filmed by a secret camera deep in the emperor's bunker. We see Hirohito waited on by his cringeing retainers, who dress and feed him as if he were a handicapped child, which in effect he was. As he waits for them to button his shirt, or murmurs to his marine biology specimens in his private laboratory, he resembles a royal figure rather closer to home: well-meaning, babied by his wife and utterly disengaged from reality.
When the Pacific war drew to a close there were powerful voices among the Allies who called for Hirohito to be tried as a war criminal. But MacArthur feared this would so humiliate the Japanese that it would be impossible to maintain peace and guide the nation towards democracy.

Pedantic, dreamy, surprised by everything in the real world, Hirohito grasps that a supreme gesture is called for. In a bizarre but strangely moving moment, he informs his dazed subjects that he is no longer a god. Everyone is amazed; the madman has announced that he is no longer Napoleon. Hirohito assures his courtiers that his body, which we assume he has never closely inspected, is no different from theirs. The gesture satisfies MacArthur, and peace is secured. A few war criminals are hanged, but democracy and a guilt-free nation can work to prepare the world for the coming of the Sony Walkman. But why did the war ever begin?

Hitler's determination to invade Russia was evident from his first days in power. The expansion of the German peoples to the east and the destruction of Bolshevism are constant refrains in his speeches and writings. Germany could no longer breathe in overcrowded Europe, and the only open spaces lay in Poland and Russia. Nowhere does Hitler visualise expanding to the west, of war with France, Britain, Denmark and Holland. Hitler's invasion of Poland was his first step towards the east and a Germanic empire stretching to the Urals. Honouring their treaty commitments to Poland, the British and French governments declared war on Germany, but their armies were swiftly defeated in the field. German bombers devastated Britain's cities, and the U-boat offensive nearly starved the country into surrender. Poland received no help from us, and the Nazis turned it into a gigantic slaughterhouse.

Should Britain and France have stayed out of the war? No, emphatically. But we should have declared war on Germany only when we could win. By 1943, Hitler's forces were being ground down by the Red Army, and we would have had every chance of defeating the Germans in western Europe.

As someone who was so affected by our war with Japan, I am more interested in the consequences of the British government's misguided decision. Would Japan have attacked Pearl Harbor, the most significant event of my life, if Britain and France had not declared war on Germany in 1939? I suspect not. The attack was a desperate gamble prompted by the American oil embargo, which would be lifted only if the Japanese withdrew from China. The oil that Japan eyed so eagerly was in the Dutch East Indies, but deterred by a strong British, French and Dutch presence, the Japanese might well have yielded to American demands and withdrawn from China.

The Japanese tanks that I saw rolling into Shanghai on the day of the attack might have been moving in the opposite direction. The lives of millions of Chinese and Asians would have been spared, along with thousands of British soldiers in Burma and Singapore.

I would never have seen my father in a state of panic and confusion when he burst into my bedroom and told me to get dressed, adding (the most amazing thing I had ever heard) that there would be no more school. I would never have seen my mother endure the freezing winters in our unheated concrete buildings in Lunghua Camp, where we were interned. I would never have heeded the warnings that I sensed deep inside my head, telling me that I would have to look after myself, nature's most frightening alarm call.

As it happened, our lives in Shanghai came to a sudden end. During the years of internment I saw a great many adults weakened by hunger and malaria, gradually losing hope that the war would ever end. Parents in the camp were unable to feed their children, protect them or even keep them warm. Lunghua was in effect an enormous slum, and as in any slum the teenage boys ran wild. Though I was not aware of it, all this probably led to the estrangement between my parents and myself that lasted all my life.

At the same time, I would never have become a hyperactive adolescent, impatient with English life, who in middle age began to wonder if his whole life had been a strange and avoidable accident, prompted by a misguided British prime minister and a Japanese emperor who was unable to restrain his generals but believed that he was a god.

The Sun brilliantly sums up all the dilemmas that surround war and peace. We see the great protagonists of world war as individuals coming to terms with the differences that separate their rival cultures; Hirohito and MacArthur reveal their total incomprehension of each other. That a final reconciliation was reached by one of them declaring he was not a god, and that this was accepted by the other, MacArthur, as a resolution that would guarantee peace and democracy, is the great achievement at the heart of this remarkable film.

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