The Sun

Issei Ogata as Emperor Hirohito in The Sun

Aleksandr Sokurov's The Sun is an idiosyncratic portrait of Japan's Emperor Hirohito towards the end of the Second World War. Sokurov and his scenarists play up the helplessness and quirkiness of Hirohito as he goes about his daily routine in an underground bunker while the empire falls around him. Issei Ogata, best known as the befuddled Dad in Yi Yi, portrays an emperor seemingly more suited to pursuing his interests in marine biology and poetry than in helming an empire.

The film culminates in Hirohito's decision to forsake his role as a national deity. General MacArthur is shown as willing to keep on as Emperor in the interests of continuity and national cohesion. The slow pace, desaturated colors and wry comic tone of the film may be too odd for some viewers, but Sokurov's dreamlike mise-en-scene held my attention.

Sokurov succeeds in showing the insularity of Hirohito's life. A surrealistic dream sequence shows that Hirohito was haunted by the cost of the conflict, but the film elides addressing Hirohito's culpability in Japanese war crimes. However, an offscreen tragedy, seemingly tossed as an aside at the film's conclusion, provides a final sting that casts all that has gone on before in a different light.