Akira Kurosawa also had a taste for the apocalyptic, and here, perhaps more than in any other film except for Ran, he gives into this desire to look the worst in the face. It’s not quite in the top echelon of his films, not as kaleidoscopic in its thoughts and feelings as The Seven Samurai or Red Beard, or as terse and rigorously plotted as High and Low, with some off-kilter melodrama at its core. But it’s still a fixating, almost overwhelmingly dark piece of cinema, and between this and High and Low, one begins to feel that Kurosawa’s filmmaking was its most awesomely confident in noir. The subject of The Bad Sleep Well is corporate corruption and malfeasance, the method is to quote Shakespearean plot refrains within the greater texture of a vast put-down of post-War Japanese society. It makes a film like Michael Clayton look piddling both in terms of its cynicism, and its dramatic and cinematic range.
The inexhaustible Toshiro Mifune plays Nishi, the ex-used car salesman who marries the cripple daughter, Yoshiko (Kyôko Kagawa), of the Vice-President of the anonymous-sounding Public Company, Iwabuchi (Masayuki Mori). Most think Nishi’s trying to make a quick leap up the corporate ladder, but his real motives are more mysterious than anyone can imagine. The film’s complex plot is set in motion in a breathtaking half-hour opening, at Nishi and Yoshiko’s wedding, as policemen keep dragging away guests for questioning about an erupting corruption scandal, where the company has been receiving huge kickbacks for public works contracts. A crowd of chorus-like reporters flock about the wedding and point out the various figures to each-other – and us – and remark with high sarcasm on the proceedings. “This is a great one-act,” one says. “One-act? This is just the prelude!” another assures. In his speech, Iwabuchi’s depressed, tippling son, Tatsuo (Tatsuya Mihashi), who introduced Nishi to Yoshiko, threatens to kill him if he ever hurts her. At this wedding, it’s refreshingly direct, as the other speakers, high bureaucrats and executives all, obfuscate and excuse themselves in endless clichés.
The epic opening wedding banquet: Yoshiko is brought in, supported by her mother, the wooden support shoe she wears making its clattering music.
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Wada, called from his duties, confronted by police and journalists.
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Moriyama (Takeshi Shimura) tensely proposes a toast, aware of the arrests.
The corks pop like a firing squad.
Tatsuo knows what to with champagne – drink it.
Visual tension – the conformity of the wedding guests/corporate people, with the looser, more individual poses of the sarcastic, observing reporters.
Tatsuo, about to warn Nishi of the dangers of harming his sister.
Nishi and Yoshiko, the happy couple.
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The public nature of the wedding banquet is soon swapped for a suffocating psychological and interpersonal intensity. The Public Company’s executives are soon revealed as having the awesome power to destroy people with an order – one of their arrested bookkeepers throws himself under a truck, and another, Wada (Kamatari Fujiwara), a small, fluttering man, goes to hurl himself into a volcano – but Nishi prevents him. Instead, in a dizzying scene, he forces him to watch his own funeral, and listen to a tape recording outlining his bosses’ complete disregard for his presumed sacrifice. Instead Nishi uses Wada in his programme to destroy the executives one by one, up to and including his father-in-law, in revenge for his own father’s death by suicide, forced by the company five years earlier. Nishi appears implacable and cruel, but in fact he’s straining to be as savage as his opponents, with a basic decency in him that blocks him from fighting them as psychopathically as they can. His efforts drive one executive crazy, almost a mockery of his intentions. Iwabuchi is defined in the fashion few villains had been in the cinema, but would later become very familiar post-The Godfather, as the sort of man who can be cheerfully barbecuing one minute, and order a man’s murder the next. Nishi, however, must work himself into an agonised fury to push himself to revenge. However, despite all intentions, he falls in love with the crippled but game Yoshiko. Kurosawa’s crux of tragedy, then, comes in analysing how hard it is for a moral, feeling person to fight debased, distant assassins cocooned by power and privilege. Nishi’s frenzied efforts consume his willpower, and whilst it’s not so hard for him to smash down the slick facades of the executives, but the cost to himself is vast.
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Nishi intervenes to stop Wada’s suicide.
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The Bad Sleep Well has an interesting forestalling structure. The main characters barely speak in the first half-hour, as the power and personal relationships are spelt out by journalists and lackeys. To a certain extent this is the point, as humanity has been replaced by codified relations of advantage and subservience, and the truth of the characters can only make itself apparent slowly, in the shadows. This does, however, slightly curb Kurosawa’s gift for exploring his characters, who only come into the light too late. Instead, Nishi’s slightly too baroque methods of destroying his opponents, like having Wada constantly reveal himself to one executive who begins to crack up, strains credibility. But the film, despite its glaze of nuclear-age realism, is really a heightened Jacobean piece, nearly a horror film. The film builds itself broadly around ideas taken from Hamlet, Titus Andronicus, and even Romeo and Juliet. Broadly speaking, Iwabuchi is Claudius, and Nishi is Hamlet, but not as reflective – he has a semi-articulate confusion, consuming others in his quest to cleanse the world. Tatsuo is Laertes, though he really possesses more of Hamlet’s assailed soul, and Yoshiko is Ophelia, though in some ways closer to Titus’ Lavinia, and unlike either, Nishi pays her the compliment in eventually of asking for her engaged moral maturity; if she wants to love him, she must acquiesce to her father’s deserved punishment. It’s not, I think, coincidental that the film’s most crucial truths, both positive – like Yoshiko and Nishi’s final reconciliation – and dreadful – Nishi’s fate – can only unfold underground, far from the gaze of the modern world. Wada, a manipulated, meek man, is forced to watch his own funeral, hear his own life reduced to a glib conversation before a roll with a prostitute, and plays his own ghost, acknowledging that he already was one. That he tries, in the end, to act humanely, actually sets in motion the destruction of all – the cluelessly conscientious are the most endangered.
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Attending your own funeral: “Why are you doing this to me?”
The importance of acknowledgement: Wada finds some thing should not have to be seen, but must be seen nonetheless…
…as his wife and daughter and the bosses who betrayed him pay him homage.
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Despite the familiar basis, the film’s plot never progresses in a predictable fashion. We dread that this game will chew up some innocent, but just who it will be remains a taunting threat through the picture. Kurosawa pitches some scenes close to black comedy, like the stark contrast between the grim men’s business Nishi commits himself to, with his prevaricating unease in contemplating buying a bouquet for Yoshiko, as an overture to a proper wedding night, one that will never come, as his identity is blown. Nishi and Yoshiko later have a heartbreaking reunion, where her own hobbling of the leg, caused in a childhood accident with self-accusing Tatsuo, matches Nishi’s hobbled soul, bent out of shape by his own complex relationship with his foolish father. Thus, the film becomes an explicit generation parable, establishing the anger and disappointment, and also longing, sustained between men of Kurosawa’s age and the elders.
Vice-President Iwabachi…at the seat of power…
…and at home, with Yukisho, playing the good papa.
Shirai (Kô Nishimura) walks home, only to see…
…a ghost, or what’s left of Wada.
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Kurosawa’s filmmaking is often at its most exquisite, particularly in his use of sound, like the champagne corks that pop like a firing squad at the wedding, and the caustically appropriate way Nishi’s recording of the executives accords with their hypocritical bows and fawning at Wada’s fake funeral. His Tohoscope framings are as intricate and deeply composed, and yet unstudied, as ever, especially in the ballet of introduced detail and occurence that is the opening.
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Impossible desire: Nishi and Yukisho.
A junkie assassin sent to kill the unravelling Shirai, interrupted.
The conspirators survey the world they’ve inherited.
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The final act revolves around one of Kurosawa’s beloved blasted wastelands, this one the ruin of a steel factory that Nishi and his partner in vengeance (Takeshi Katô) worked in as teenagers, during the war. Kurosawa makes a clear analogy both with the threat of nuclear holocaust, and the fear that the annihilated world the young men ascended into has not really grown back in any moral or emotional sense. The film takes broad aim at a modern world given over to incredible greed and consumerist fancy. The awesome hegemony of the Company is identified as extending pre-War, wrapping the proceedings with an aggrieved sense of accusation at the willingness of the Imperial-era government and its successors, the still-feudal corporations, to wrap themselves in banners of righteousness and rely on their servant’s unquestioning conformity and loyalty, to sacrifice themselves for their superiors. Kurosawa takes deadly aim at this conformity, which is so ingrained that Nishi’s mission ultimately proves impotent – it’s left to a drunk and crippled girl to make a last stand for decency, one that’s barely noticed by their father as he makes obsequious pleas to his remote and unseen President.
Driven underground – Nishi and Itakura grill Moriyama.
Nishi and Yokisho reunited…
…and reach an emotional impasse.
Yoshiko and Tatsuo, too late to the rescue.
Despair.
The end of Nishi’s plot.
Too little, too late.
