By Roger Ebert
Translator: issac
Proofreading: Easy two three
Source: rogerebert.com
Akira Kurosawa's Red Beard, about Early Nineteenth-Century Japan, is a passionate humanitarian manifesto and almost the last article he wrote about exemplary people.
Red Beard
In 1965, after two years of shooting, the maestro turned to imperfect, flawed roles—one of which was the male lead in Chaos (1985), a film inspired by Shakespeare's King Lear.
Doctor Redbeard is the kindest and most moral character he has ever created. In this movie, you can feel Akira Kurosawa's most beautiful nature.
In the second act of his career, he allowed frustration and skepticism to run through the process, ending this phase with Rhapsody in August (1991), about the Nagasaki disaster, and Sunset Love (1993), about an old professor beloved by his students. The latter title means "not yet!" The professor recited the poem at a birthday party hosted by the students.
He's not dead yet—not dead yet. Akira Kurosawa may have seen some of his own shadow in the professor, who later died in 1995.
The man named Redbeard is the head of a century-old village clinic that specializes in treating poor and even penniless people. Redbeard is played by Toshiro Mifune, his sixteenth and final collaboration with Akira Kurosawa.
Toshiro Mifune and Akira Kurosawa
What a long road they had traveled together—Rashomon, The Seven Samurai, Heart Stick, Heaven and Hell, etc.—and after that, what a peaceful farewell the two of them were.
Dr. Redbeard doesn't even appear at the beginning of the film, but he's all over the clinic. The clinic is located in an unremarkable neighborhood, a simple but very clean house (Kurosawa Akira built a traditional village around it).
This movie is not actually about Redbeard at all, but about the story of the ambitious young man Homoto (played by Yuzo Kayama). He graduated from a Dutch medical school in Japan and fantasized that he would quickly join the shogunate. He was resentful during his internship at the clinic because he had heard rumors of the imperious director and "smelly" customers of the clinic. He suspected that behind his nameless position there might be a family conspiracy.
Clinics seem to allow a degree of democracy between patients and noisy, energetic caregivers and kitchen workers.
They have their own opinions on everything. Some patients, such as Sahachi (Tsutomu Yamazaki), are not dying, but seem to live permanently, and we find that Redbeard's method is to indirectly heal the soul and body. In some ways, the clinic is a resettlement site.
The new capital protector refused to cooperate. There is no doubt that it is unfair for him to be in this stagnant position. He even refused to put on the doctor's robe. Akira Kurosawa established an omniscient but invisible presence for Redbeard, and finally introduced him from behind, and after some delay, suddenly turned to the young intern.
Toshiro Mifune gave Redbeard a cold unpredictability; the doctor believed in teaching through physical objects and practice, not through lectures.
Hoburn's first task was simply to look at an old man by his side when he died. He found himself almost incompetent for the task. It's too real, it's too painful. Redbeard teaches people to have their own set. Baoben believes that medicine is a career path, not an interaction with patients.
He is warned to stay away from the beautiful patient known as the "praying mantis" (Kyoko Kagawa), who is ostracized for murdering her husband. But she was full of temptations, and Baoben almost lost her life in order to help her. See how Akira Kurosawa put his two characters in a room together to concentrate on the danger.
The saint was close to death. Every day, he sells what he makes for his patients. A mudslide destroyed the calm of the clinic, and a skeleton was dug up. The old man knew that the skeleton belonged to his wife. No, he didn't kill her. The truth is even more tragic than that.
Using an evocative flashback, he tells the audience a story that includes an earthquake. We noticed that Akira Kurosawa shot the earthquake very well, shooting through the dust, the movement of the foreground of the picture, and a group of people running away at the top of the picture.
The second act begins with Redbeard and Hoboro going to a brothel to treat syphilis. There, they find the injured twelve-year-old Ato (Terumi Nimoto), who obsessively scrubs the wooden floor. Her mother died outside a brothel, and the rude lady "gave her a home", essentially a sex slave.
Redbeard said she had a fever and he was going to take her to the clinic. Madame refused, and called her guards.
There's a scene that's very interestingly detached from the mood of the movie, in which Redbeard skillfully uses martial arts and relies on his knowledge of bones to break the hands and feet of all the guards and scatter them around in the courtyard. Then he took Xiaofeng with him.
When they left, he apologized to Hobo for his use of violence. This is a theme that runs through the film: Redbeard's critique of his own mistakes. As the victim lay there groaning, he told his students that doctors must never harm others.
Xiaofeng's story provides an emotional core for RedBeard. I won't reveal too much. The audience has to experience it for themselves. But note (after Redbeard orders Hooray to lock Upo in his room for observation and treatment), Xiaofeng wakes up from behind him in the dark, screams and sits up straight.
She was in the shadows, and only a pinpoint-like light illuminated her eyes, which glowed ferociously like tigers. She turned around, and it was a dark shadow. Then she lowered her head, and her eyes shone again from the darkness. The photographic design here must be very meticulous.
Redbeard's philosophy seems to be that helping others will make patients grow better. Two centuries ago, he had a wise and instinctive understanding of psychology: he would not admonish patients or help them "talk" about their problems. He puts them in a physical environment so that they can comb through themselves and focus on the troubles of others. That's the treatment. It is suitable for Xiaofeng and capital preservation.
Xiao Feng, who had a nervous breakdown, noticed that a thief who was only half her size was stealing porridge. She was extremely nervous, but she still gave the other person some food and participated in his life. In telling the story of the thief, Akira Kurosawa's composition is superb and subtle, with images of dried sheets or kimono clotheslines running through them.
In the foreground, Homoto and a nurse listen, while above the background, the thief tells his story. As I described, this must be hard to imagine. How do you combine the top, bottom, foreground, and rear in this way? Akira Kurosawa did this with simple elegance.
For me, the most memorable scene in the film takes place when the little boy is dying. There was a terrible cry from outside. What will it be? It was the voice of the cooks, shouting the name of the thief into the well, which was said to penetrate into the heart of the earth where people's souls would go.
They were calling him back. Xiaofeng ran out and joined them. It seemed like a single shot, looking up at them calling out to the people in the well, and then down the walls of the well, looking at their reflections. I don't know how this is done.
Another example of photography is that it moves with the seasons. Shooting rain and snow is notoriously tough. Both work well. We knew Akira Kurosawa was waiting for a real snowfall. Is he also waiting for it to really rain? I've never seen such a wet rain in another movie.
Redbeard is a long and well-made film, which is inevitable, because the lessons of the great doctor cannot be summed up in simple little fragments. Doctors need to observe the patient for a period of time before death to understand the patient's condition.
We need to observe how a person who thinks he is flawed becomes completely kind. How an unearned, self-esteemed person learns virtue from humility.
I think all medical students should see this movie. Like Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece The Desire to Live (1952), it fearlessly views the meaning of life and death.