Dancing Souls

Taking on Herzog's baffling "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans" and Sokurov's portrait of a dictator "The Sun."

Almost as mysterious, but by no means suffering a lack of control, Aleksandr Sokurov’s “The Sun” crawls into American theaters after three years in the shrugging-distributor desert, and its waxworks sobriety is its secret weapon, limning the final days of WWII in the company of Hirohito (Issey Ogata) as if the man had already died and found himself stuck in his own private antechamber of Hell.

Rounding off Sokurov’s eccentric, conceptual trilogy of 20th-century totalitarian final days biopics, a project that has insisted on viewing the characters of Hitler, Lenin and Hirohito as embodiments of their own historical function, “The Sun” deals with a dazed, nervous and emotionally benumbed royal figure who’d rather be studying hydrobiology, and who struggles mostly with the fact that his nation believes him to be a god and by war’s end, he knows he must admit he’s not.

The film itself is anything but realistic — Sokurov spends the first third of the film inside Hirohito’s sepulchral bunker, which is decorated and shot like a Lynchian dream-room or Quay puppet cellar, and everyone, from the emperor to his generals and servants, live in a state of knotted dread. (The soundtrack is an anxiety machine all its own, full of background insect menace and impossible machine groanings.) Then the film seizures, with a Boschian vision of a burning city (Tokyo?) over which flying fish sail through the flames and smoke. Huh?

Sokurov is an impulsive poet, and as meditative as his films are, his narrative and tonal decisions can be baffling, even when they’re still beautiful. You take them as they come, since he’s one of a kind — shot in self-evident digital video, “The Sun” is a haunting question mark, in which the usual questions about dictator’s wartime culpability, leaders’ psychology and real politics are obviated in favor of empathy for the ironic mysteries of Hirohito’s 1945 days, lost in his own kingdom, twitching and meekly acquiescing to Japan’s failure, and eventually having to enter into an awkward social relationship with MacArthur (Robert Dawson), resulting in the war’s official end.

There can be little excuse, I think, for essentially absolving Hirohito from responsibility in the matter of Japanese war crimes, which the film definitely does, even if implicitly. (Before his death in 1989, it was taboo to question the emperor’s “non-involvement” in the war, but scholarship done since then has left no doubt — he was responsible, albeit from a distance, from the 1931 invasion of Manchuria onward.)

But Sokurov likes politics to generate from his films like heat from a fire; remember how “Russian Ark” pointed no explicit fingers, but by virtue of The Hermitage tour, in and of itself, made a devastating statement about aristocratic super-wealth. For him, Hirohito is just a diffident man who made decisions and succumbed to delusions and lived 24-hour days like the rest of us (Issey’s performance is chilling and hard to forget), and who seems shut off from his decisions’ consequences, like royalty everywhere. (“The Japanese are not Asian people,” Sokurov has said cryptically in an interview, “They are closer to the Englishman with their island self-consciousness.”) Sokurov loves, most of all, the weird differential between how warmongering dictators are perceived by the rest of us, and how they actually, unspectacularly, are.

“Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans” opens in limited release on November 20th; “The Sun” is now open in New York and will open in Los Angeles on November 27th.

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