Kurosawa's Dreams

More from my series on the work of Akira Kurosawa...

Now, "Dreams" is a series of vignettes taken from, you guessed it, the dreams of the director. The main character starts out a young boy who witnesses a wedding procession of foxes, which is forbidden, and then goes to seek their forgiveness under a rainbow. He also speaks with life-sized dolls who celebrate a chopped-down peach orchard by dancing in ceremonial kimono. Several of the vignettes are explicitly about war - one in which a commanding soldier encounters the soldiers he sent to their deaths is particularly moving - and nuclear holocaust. Most jarring, although beautiful, was when the movie suddenly shifted into French - then English - in a piece about Vincent Van Gogh (played by Martin Scorcese) and the main character finds himself lost inside Van Gogh's paintings.
These pieces are really more like visual poems than a fictional narrative, with a lot of imagery and very little dialogue. A scene in which men are lost in a blizzard is little more than flying snow and sound effects of wind and walking for ten minutes - until they encounter "Yuki-Onna," a snow maiden. The sense that Kurosawa was trying to make sense of the Japanese society's (and his own personal) love of the natural world and the devastation that arose from technology and war really comes through in the film.
Since I've written both about the legend of the kitsune and Yuki-Onna, I really loved the film. It's not about action, it's very lyric and experimental. The more I get to know his work, the more I enjoy it.