FILM.
HIGH AND LOW
1963 | DIRECTED BY AKIRA KUROSAWA
Perversely excited to talk about a film Letterboxd ranks so high and I so low.
"So low" is an exaggeration. It's visually superb but I couldn't pass up the parallelism.
The movie starts off as a high Freudian study in guilt consciousness but quickly devolves into a low bourgeois fable.
The living room scene where everyone is tugging at Gondo's conscience not only has great tragicomic timing but raises delicious real-life ethical dilemmas: What responsibility do we have to one another? Must we do right at any cost? How much is a life worth?
I was gearing up for a juicy whodunit full of twists and turns exploring these thorny questions. Could it be Gondo's "loyal" assistant when he snuck upstairs to book his flight? Or his wife, tired of her absent husband and ready to abscond with his dough? Perhaps the two are having an affair and colluding against Gondo! Or maybe it's even the police, under the thumb of his powerful business rivals. And let's not forget Schinichi's working-class father, who certainly has his own pecuniary motives.
All my hunches were wrong. And all of the above moral meditations are overshadowed by a single strident frame: that of the benevolent businessman ravaged by a depraved poor person—no animal!
We're supposed to feel bad for a wealthy executive who's now in debt because he overleveraged himself in a bid for a hostile takeover. And celebrate him for paying — eventually, nearly against his will, and only after the repeated begging of every member of his entourage — the ransom. Later we're told he was a tough but fair factory owner. Give me a break!
Running parallel, we have the brave and tireless police, who drop everything to catch the kidnapper-monster. Gondo is entitled to justice! And more importantly, his money back. Literally every officer in the prefecture is assigned to the case. Dutiful use of resources.
After they zero in on Ginjiro, Father Law doesn't think 15 years is enough, so they entrap him in a would-be double murder, sacrificing one disposable heroin addict woman in the process to enable a death sentence.
Gondo recovers his cash but loses his house — boo hoo, more sympathy for the rich man. Then in another noble display of compassion, he visits Ginjiro who is awaiting execution.
I thought, hoped there may be a redemptive moment revealing Ginjiro's hand scar was sustained working in Gondo's factory. But the provenance is never disclosed.
Instead, the "emotionally disturbed" Ginjiro babbles nonspecifically about his hard life before suffering a nervous breakdown. He's forcefully removed from the visiting booth and an iron gate descends over the viewing window, as if to say that the condition of the poor is hopelessly opaque.
The end.
There is some critical gesturing toward inequality. Like the POV of Gondo’s estate from the sweltering slums. But there’s too much capitalist apologia for me to get down with the movie, no matter how beautifully it's set, framed, blocked, shot, etc.
READ HERE.