Masaki Kobayashi

(On Cable TV, April 2022) One of my core beliefs as a critic is that endings can make or break a film. They’re not everything (and that’s why I’m not averse to explaining the nature of endings with little regard for overly protective spoiler alerts), but they shape the meaning of movies and how viewers react to them. In this light, the supremely depressing ending of The Human Condition III: A Soldier’s Prayer is monumental, because it caps nine hours of film designed as a single story. What viewers may be able to forgive after a ten-minute subplot or a ninety-minute horror film may not be the same as how they’ll feel after nine hours of gruelling suffering for the central characters. But writer-director Masaki Kobayashi makes his choices and sticks to them here, all the way to an impressive bleakness that does give a very different flavour to the trilogy than what it would have been with an upbeat, satisfying ending. As much as I have painfully slogged through those nine hours (well, fewer than that – there was a liberal use of fast-forwarding), I am ready to concede that The Human Condition, designed as it was as a humanistic anti-war statement, would be a far lesser achievement with a happy ending. The masochistic suffering of its viewers is the point, one could say while suffering echoes of Stockholm’s syndrome. Compared to the first two volumes, this final act is far more anarchistic: there’s little wartime glory here, and plenty of incidents to show how it’s impossible to hold on to ideals in wartime, especially after the fighting is over and the real survival efforts begin. I am not likely to revisit the trilogy any time soon, but it’s going to haunt me – few other works of that magnitude would have dared such uncompromising nihilism.

(On Cable TV, April 2022) I can appreciate the arguments of film purists arguing in favour of watching the film as faithfully as possible to the director’s intentions. After all, the first thing I do on each new TV is to turn off motion smoothing to get the 24-frames-a-second feel. But ultimately, the death of the auteur theory of media consumption is right – it’s up to the viewer to decide how they engage with the material to the extent of their tolerance. I used to have qualms about watching silent dramas in fast forward. But I don’t any more: that simple modification, taking into account the lower narrative density of that era, has saved me time and kept me sane through otherwise interminable experiences. Fans of director Masaki Kobayashi’s nine-hour trilogy The Human Condition will be aghast at learning that I watched much of the second instalment (technically parts 3 and 4) on 4x fast forward. But why wouldn’t I? The film is three hours long, in subtitled Japanese. Furthermore, the bottom line is this: I had a much better time watching the film in my way. I was done in less than an hour, kept up with the faster tempo and didn’t feel as if anything was left out. It helps that the film followed a familiar structure, sending its protagonist to boot camp before deploying to combat – there are similarities here with later movies such as Full Metal Jacket, and that’s the kind of guideline, coupled with the slow pacing of the film in the first place, that makes it easy to follow in 4x speed. I did dial down the speed back to normal during the third-act battle sequences, just to take in the helplessness of what individual soldiers felt like when facing a row of tanks advancing toward them – after more than two hours of very long drama, the film does kick in high gear during its climactic battle sequences. Still, that’s the kind of adaptation that proves my point: the pacing of the film until that point is too slow, so I sped it up. As a result, I did like this second instalment of The Human Condition well enough – I’ve watched better, but it wasn’t as excruciating as the first film’s full three hours felt like.