-Devdutt Trivedi
One Wonderful Sunday, although often relegated to the position of being amongst the great Akira Kurosawa’s weakest hours in cinema, is also amongst his most uncharacteristic and therefore unique works. The film is outside Kurosawa’s signature approach consisting of his emphasis on quick editing, transitions most often through wipes and a characteristic reliance on the use of close-ups. This tendency of the film to fall outside of Kurosawa’s oeuvre is precisely what makes the film even more rewarding on reassessment after all these years.
Kurosawa adapted the popular shomin-geki or ‘social drama’ genre in 1949, four years after the American Occupation of Japan. This gave the maestro sufficient space to observe, analyze and reflect on the changes in psychological and physical attitudes in post-war Japanese society. The approach chosen by Kurosawa is reminiscent of the working-class settings of Yasujiro Ozu’s early silent works especially Passing Fancy (1932), the early films of Keinoshuke Kinoshita and reminiscent of the working-class consciousness of his own war propaganda effort, The Most Beautiful(1943).
Kurosawa’s first post-war revaluation No Regrets for Our Youth (1946) is centered on a female character. With One Wonderful Sunday, although set around a couple finding it difficult to make ends meet in post-war Tokyo, returns to the masculine concerns of his debut Sugata Sanshiro(1943). Kurosawa would further develop these masculine concerns in his best known samurai works such as The Seven Samurai(1955),Throne of Blood (1958), High and Low (1963) and Ran (1985).
Kurosawa is influenced in One Wonderful Sunday by The Italian Neo-Realist movement. This important movement through the ‘40s to the early 60’s branched out from the Lumiere-influenced works of the French master, Jean Renoir such as Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932) and especially Toni (1935). The techniques used by the Italian Neo-realists such as Cesare Zavattini, Lucino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica, included shooting on location and using non-actors to transform texts set in Italy’s working class into films that stood for the staggering potential of cinema to side with the working class through narrative. The objective of this approach was to capture the nature of reality assuming that this conception of reality had only one dimension to it i.e. it was homogenous in quality and quantity thus giving it the title ‘realism.’ Perhaps the most important work of this movement is Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, also completed in 1949. Having won the Golden Lion at Venice for Rashomon in 1950, Kurosawa commented in 1951 that he hoped to win the Golden Lion at some point for a film ‘representing more of present day Japan, such a film as Bicycle Thieves.’ *
One Wonderful Sunday functions in the tradition of the social-realist comedies of Frank Capra, for Kurosawa was equally influenced by the conservative leaning approach of Capra alongside John Ford, and is a frank depiction of the times. Kurosawa represents a society where poverty co-exists with quick money, denoted in the sequence where Masako goes to his army colleagues’ cabaret only to be given a sizable amount of money and shown the door. Masako’s experiences at the cabaret paint a vivid picture of post-war Japan. The drunken lady and the business-talking old gentleman, along with painting a dark picture of the working class space, show Kurosawa’s own superior gaze at the lower class lumpen characters at the den. The film serves as an important step for Kurosawa, who would take forward this social critique in the cop and robber story Stray Dog made
in 1949, and more important in his depictions of the Japanese mafia in High and Low (1963) and The Bad Sleep Well (1966).
The film is divided into long sequences where a single space is established over a long period of time followed by a series of quick cuts that trigger off an event. It communicates a world where the characters require dreams to continue functioning but at the same time won’t help the barebones situation of post-war Japan; as stated by Masako at the beginning of the film where she says, ‘Dreams won’t fill the belly.’
When the couple misses buying cheap tickets for a live performance of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, Masako confronts the culprits. Kurosawa portrays Masako in an idealistic light verging on the absurd, particularly in the sequence where Masako confronts the black marketers. In portraying the violence between Masako and the ticket sellers, Kurosawa is commenting on the nature of masculinity and violence, heightened by Yuzo’s lack of participation in the action.
Kurosawa subverts cliché by transforming the function of cliché from cinematic device to social commentary. The exaggerated expression of Yuzo in the final scene along with the clichéd movement of the leaves in the amphitheatre to the same Schubert symphony, subvert cliché to harsh reality. Earlier in the film, Kurosawa randomly cuts to random locations that the lover’s visit together, by using the voice over of the specific character on the image. An example of this is the sequence at the zoo. Kurosawa splits the action between location space and narrative progression which is primarily aided by the lines uttered by the character-actors, in this case over the image, which gives the effect of a conventional Hollywood voice-over.
The climax where Masako tries to raise Yuzo’s spirits by enacting a live performance of Schubert’s symphony in a vacated amphitheatre breaks the fourth wall between the audience with Masako play acting as the conductor and looking straight into the camera. Yuzo also looks back at the camera and urges the audience to applaud at Masako’s performance. In his Something like an Autobiography, referred to the scene and explained his intention. He said ‘What I wanted to do with this scene was transform the audience into actual participants in the plot.’ *
The film was rejected by the Japanese audience. It did however, according to Kurosawa, win audience approval when it played many years later in Paris where the audience applauded with enthusiasm.
* Courtesy: Stephen Prince, Criterion Collection