Dreams (1990)

Dreams arrives from 1990, a year in which a director could still assemble eight personal vignettes and call the result a motion picture. Kurosawa, working from his own nocturnal material, gives us fox weddings, a peach orchard staffed by the spirits of felled trees, a blizzard, a tunnel crowded with dead soldiers, Van Gogh played by Martin Scorsese, and two separate apocalypses. The anthology form suits him. Each segment is a small sealed room, and the viewer is escorted through them like a guest at a very long and very serious dinner party.

The environmental sermonizing is where the film's social consciousness pools. Mount Fuji in Red stages a nuclear meltdown and then pauses for a lecture on radioactive isotopes, a man in a suit helpfully explaining that red means plutonium and yellow means strontium, before conceding the uselessness of color-coding one's own extinction. The Weeping Demon follows a nuclear holocaust in which former millionaires and government officials have sprouted horns and now howl through the night, a punishment calibrated to their sins. The Village of the Water Mills closes the picture with a community that has forsaken electricity and modern convenience, its elders explaining, at length, why the old ways are better. The lecturing is not subtle. It is not meant to be.

Elsewhere the film is gentler and stranger. The Tunnel carries a commander's grief for the platoon he sent to die, and it moves without reaching for any modern vocabulary of guilt. The Peach Orchard mourns what a family cut down. Crows lets Scorsese wander a wheat field and lose an ear. The contemporary apparatus of representation, identity, and institutional critique is simply absent. The cast is Japanese, the women are mothers and spirits, and the politics belong to a man who believes we are poisoning the earth. A sober vintage. Strong on nature, light on intersectionality.