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Summary
Dreams (夢, Yume) is an eight vignette magical realism film written and directed by Akira Kurosawa in 1990. It was inspired by real dreams that Kurosawa claimed to have had repeatedly. It was his first film in 45 years in which he was the sole author of the screenplay.
Akira Kurosawa's antepenultimate film, Dreams, is unlike any of the revered Japanese auteur's previous works, although it shares some characteristics with Dodes'ka-den (1970), his first color film, which intertwined a group of loosely connected stories taking place in a slum on the outskirts of Tokyo. Dreams has a similar narrative logic in that it is a set of eight stories, although they all take the form of dreams and have entirely different thematic aims and aesthetic designs. They are linked by a recurring character/dreamer referred to in some of the credits as "I" (a filmic stand-in for Kurosawa, who based his screenplay on his own dreams and memories), whom we see in each dream as a toddler (Akira Terao), as a young child (Toshihiko Nakano), as a teenager (Mitsunori Isaki), and at different stages of adulthood. The film's title is appropriate because nothing takes place outside the dream world; there is no waking, no reality, only the dreams themselves, each of which is presented as a slice of dream experience with varying degrees of fantasy, wish fulfillment, horror and regret.
Kurosawa, who trained as a painter, was always a director of enormous visual inventiveness, willing to break the rules, experiment with conventions, and mix features of Eastern and Western cinema as he saw fit. Many of his films could be described as "painterly," especially once he switched to color after 1970, but Dreams is arguably his most painterly cinematic achievement, in part because he is not constrained by the requirements of a narrative structure from beginning to end (so everything takes on a symbolic and metaphorical, rather than narrative, value) and by the physical rules of the "real" world. As the entirety of the film takes place in various dreams, he is free to explore visual representation in any way he chooses, resulting in some of the most beautiful images of his long career. The film is replete with unforgettable moments, such as the disappearance of the "I" into a huge field of flowers flanked in the sky by a rainbow, a steep grassy hill suddenly covered in peach blossoms, a merciless blizzard giving rise to a spirit trapped in the snow, the ghostly specter of an entire platoon that was annihilated during the war, a world suddenly depicted in the form of Vincent Van Gogh paintings, and a nuclear reactor melting down and causing atomic explosions around Mount Fuji, which is rendered with deliberately dated special effects that make them look like remnants of a monster movie (no wonder Gojira director Ishirô Honda appears as an assistant director).
Like any anthology film, Dreams is somewhat uneven, with some segments registering more emotional, visual and symbolic power than others. Interestingly, the segments that tend to work best are those most clearly indebted to the Japanese horror tradition, an aspect of cinema that Kurosawa had rarely integrated into his films (though he was certainly responsible for helping to increase the visual presence of graphic bloodshed in world cinema with his early 1960s samurai films Yojimbo and Sanjuro). The Yuki-onna (spirit woman) in "The Blizzard" sequence, who tries to lure a climber up the mountain to sleep and thus die, is memorably creepy, while the ghosts of the blue-faced soldiers in "The Tunnel" create a genuine sense of despair at the futility of war and the high human cost of Japanese imperialism. The explosion of reactors and the ensuing terror in "Mount Fuji in Red" is an evocative and self-conscious means of conveying the deep nuclear fears of the era, which is also the central theme of "The Crying Demon," depicting a post-nuclear apocalyptic landscape dotted with huge dandelions and one-horned human survivors suffering terrible agony. At the same time, however, the film is filled with images of dazzling beauty and hope. "Crows," the segment in which the world becomes several Van Gogh paintings, is a true artist's delight, while "The Village of Watermills" concludes the film with a sense of idyllic togetherness.
As with his two previous films, the samurai epics Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985), Dreams was made possible in part by American filmmakers who had been inspired by Kurosawa's works when they were film students in the 1960s and wanted to help prolong his career (by the late 1970s he could no longer get work in Japan). In this case, Steven Spielberg and his production company Amblin Entertainment acted as "anchors," helping to secure worldwide distribution by Warner Bros. while George Lucas enlisted the services of his effects house Industrial Light & Magic to produce the Van Gogh effects and Martin Scorsese appears on screen as Van Gogh (with his hair and beard dyed red, he looks remarkably like the painter). The result is a film that, while not necessarily among Kurosawa's best, is still a remarkable achievement.
Warner Bros.' 2003 DVD of Dreams was nothing to write home about, but it is easily surpassed by Criterion's stunning new Blu-ray, which features a newly restored 16-bit digital transfer supervised by cinematographer Shoji Ueda. The transfer was made from the original 35mm camera negative and digitally restored, and looks absolutely stunning. Being one of Kurosawa's most dazzling films, Dreams deserves the best possible treatment, and this is it. The image is sharp and beautifully rendered in terms of detail, allowing us to get lost in the waves of grass, mounds of snow, and burnt landscapes. The colors are extraordinary, with gorgeous primary hues that make the fields of flowers, rainbows and various elaborate costumes pop off the screen with real intensity. The sequence of Van Gogh paintings is especially impressive and could serve any home theater aficionado well to show off their best projector. The original stereo soundtrack has been remastered from the 35mm magnetic tracks and sounds wonderful. There is good stereo separation at some moments, notably the howling wind in "The Blizzard" sequence and the nuclear reactor explosions in "Mount Fuji in Red," while the use of classical music (particularly Chopin and Russian composer Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov) boasts plenty of richness and depth.
Criterion has packed the disc in terms of supplements, beginning with a new audio commentary by prolific film scholar Stephen Prince. As with the other commentaries he has recorded for Criterion releases of Kurosawa films, including The Hidden Fortress, Red Beard, Ran, among others, Prince offers a fascinating wealth of information about the film. He talks succinctly and thoughtfully about the film's aesthetic qualities, its connection to Kurosawa's other works and biography, and the various ways in which Japanese art and culture influenced it. Also included are two extensive documentaries: Making of "Dreams" (1990), a 150-minute documentary (running half an hour longer than the film itself) directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi (House) that offers reams of behind-the-scenes footage of the film's production, and Kurosawa's Way (2011), a 50-minute documentary by Kurosawa's longtime translator Catherine Cadou that includes interviews with filmmakers Bernardo Bertolucci, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Martin Scorsese and Hayao Miyazaki, among others. Criterion has also recorded new video interviews with production manager Teruyo Nogami (17 min.) and assistant director Takashi Koizumi (16 min.). The accompanying booklet includes an essay by film critic Bilge Ebiri and a section of Kurosawa's screenplay for a never-shot ninth dream, introduced by Nogami
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