• 野火 (Fires on the Plain)

7/11/21 (Sun)

Kon Ichikawa’s eye-opening 1959 film is a grim look at the actual lived experience of Japanese soldiers in WWII on the losing end of the battle in Leyte. There’s no glamour, heroism or dignity here as the desperate soldiers, pursued by the advancing Americans, escape through the forests and rough landscape toward a small coastal town on rumors of a possible rescue. Food is scarce and hope is scarcer as they scrounge to survive. They maintain military order on the surface, but their morals gradually break down as fatigue, starvation, injury and fear take their toll both physically and mentally. While the war itself is never shown, death is a constant presence, and the film has no compunction about showing rotten flesh, amputated limbs, filthy bodies covered in dirt and excrement, blood spurting or oozing from wounds, and other delights. It’s all a bit much after a while, and I started to become inured to the horrors, though maybe that was the point.

The story is told essentially through the eyes of one soldier who, having TB, is wanted neither by his troop nor the hospital. The opening image shows the soldier getting slapped hard in the face for his insolence in returning alive from the hospital, followed by a lecture by his superior that provides the story’s background in dulling detail. The tendency to tell rather than show is a bad habit of Japanese artists going back to Kabuki (though the point in that art is to highlight the storytelling skill of the performer rather than tell the story per se). So irritating.

The man takes off on his own, and from there the film becomes a picaresque tale of his encounters with various wretched folk along the way. He carries two important items: salt for life, and a grenade for death to blow himself up if captured. He is a passive observer for the most part, though at one point he instinctively kills a Filipino woman who won’t stop screaming. The various stories are only loosely connected, and characters may or may not reappear later. The enemy is largely there in the abstract, such as the faceless bombing of a hospital and church that leaves bloody piles almost unrecognizable as human. An exception is a scene in which the observer intends to give himself up, only to see another surrendering soldier gunned down viciously by a crazed Filipino woman next to a shocked US soldier who is too late to stop her. But for the most part the enemy is nowhere and everywhere, including possibly other soldiers themselves.

In one of the film’s best sequences, soldiers walking along a path fall to the ground when an enemy airplane strafes them from above. Only the uninjured few rise again to continue their push forward, unthinkingly leaving the dead behind. No blood or guts, just the lifeless bodies strewn on the ground and dazed men moving on like ants from an anthill. That scene impressed me more than the gruesomeness elsewhere, and I would have liked more of that.

A story gradually comes together toward the end with a commander and his loyal lieutenant who are living on “monkey meat” – which the observer comes to realize is the equivalent of Sweeney Todd’s meat pies. The two end up in a death match, resulting in the lieutenant killing his superior. When the observer approaches, the lieutenant looks back with a grisly smile and blood smeared across his face as he tears into the dead man’s flesh. The observer still has enough moral compass to be repulsed and kills the man on the spot. He heads toward the smoke from a distant fire, which could either be signals among Filipino guerillas or simply farmers at work and thus a symbol of civilization. As he approaches, he is shot down from behind by unseen forces, and may or may not be dead as the movie closes.

The movie has several moments of black humor. When one soldier mutters that a lifeless body is dead, the prone man raises his head from the mud and tells him to get lost, then collapses again. Another sequence sees a soldier taking the shoes from a dead man and disposing his own lesser pair, which are then picked up by the next soldier, and so on. By the time the observer arrives, the remaining shoes have no soles at all, and the image of him looking through the other end of an empty shoe is the film’s best sight gag. Still, moments like this are few and far between.

It’s been pointed out that the director, as in his previous war-related flick The Burmese Harp, doesn’t dwell too much on the fact that it was the Japanese who invaded in the first place nor on their own savage actions when things were going well. The argument is that he’s making Japanese the victims, whereas they were in fact the aggressors – especially brutal ones, at that – and thus deserving of their fate.

While that may be true, soldiers are just cogs in a big machine, and other than isolated actions of outright murder, rape and cruelty, especially among the arrogant commanders, I don’t think it’s entirely fair to blame them for their country’s evil strategy. When your country calls on you, you go, at least in those days. They’re human beings too and have hardly chosen this life for themselves. I find Burmese Harp harder to swallow since, if I recall, the former soldier is praying mainly for Japanese souls to the exclusion of others (will have to review that). Here, teenage boys have been thrown into a foreign land that they’re supposed to rule over for an unknown reason, and while they deserve to lose, they don’t deserve to die, particularly as shown here.

Ichikawa takes war from the abstract and makes it sickeningly real – Saving Private Ryan, eat your heart out (maybe not the best metaphor in this case). That doesn’t make for much of a story, but the imagery is hard to forget. Funakoshi Eiji as the observer is a cipher, more of a reactor than actor, and the ending is ambiguous as to whether he gets a chance at redemption (as in the novel) or is just another senseless victim. There are no real standouts among the cast, which may be appropriate given the theme. Calling this an anti-war film is not quite right; it’s a picture of the depths to which humans can sink in extreme circumstances and how close to animals we really are. But that doesn’t make it pleasant viewing.

I had been prompted to watch the film after seeing an ad for the 2014 color remake at a nearby theater, which I thought might be an interesting comparison. Having seen the original, I think I’ve seen enough.