BLACK RAIN Movie Review

Kuroi Ame

Japan's Shohei Imamura, whose career included serving as assistant director on Ozu's 1953 Tokyo Story and who wrote and directed the extraordinary The Ballad of Narayama in 1983, turned his attention in 1989 to the inevitable subject that Japan can never fully turn away from. Many films have dealt with the bombing of Hiroshima, yet the direct, indelible, and uncompromisingly horrifying vision that Imamura brings to the screen in Black Rain is both new and necessary. The black rain of the title is, of course, radiation; the film's subject is not the blast itself (though the bombing is not shied away from and is graphically depicted) but rather the after-effects of the explosion. The black-and-white images of Black Rain were filmed in such high contrast that they appear to have been burned into the film itself—like the shadows that still exist on walls found near the bomb's ground zero. We've seen documentaries that chronicle the effects of radiation poisoning on the bodies of survivors and their offspring, but in telling the story of a young girl who survived the bombing with no apparent visible effect, Imamura forces us to examine psychological issues that survivors of other holocausts must also confront. The young protagonist, Yasuko, lives with the knowledge of her “contamination.” But how and when will it manifest itself? What kind of life can she plan, and—most importantly in both the movie and the book on which it was based—what does she do with the shame she feels for being so different from others, the undeserved guilt of being “contaminated”? This mournful, sobering picture attained an extra degree of resonance being released in the wake of the AIDS epidemic. (The film's American release may well have been hurt by that same year's release of another Black Rain—also set in Japan—but that one a mediocre Ridley Scott thriller starring Michael Douglas.)

NEXT STOP … The Ballad of Narayama, Fires on the Plain, Rhapsody in August

1988 123m/B JP Kazuo Kitamura, Yoshiko Tanaka, Etsuko Ichihara, Shoichi Ozawa, Norihei Miki, Keisuke Ishida; D: Shohei Imamura; W: Shohei Imamura, Toshiro Ishido; C: Takashi Kawamata; M: Toru Takemitsu. VHS FXL, FCT