The Burmese Harp (1956, Kon Ichikawa) (Patreon)

72/100

Not sure whether A Midnight Clear still attracts eyeballs these days, what with Keith Gordon having entirely shifted to TV gigs. (It's been 16 years since his last feature.) That might sound like an arbitrary way to start writing about The Burmese Harp, but while William Wharton served in the U.S. infantry during World War II, and presumably wrote to some degree about his own experiences, A Midnight Clear—Gordon's adaptation of which has long been one of my favorite war movies—so closely mirrors this film's sublime opening movement that it's hard to believe Wharton hadn't seen it. Those initial 20 minutes, up to the point at which the Japanese unit learns that the war is over, are so perfectly lovely and self-contained, in fact, that I almost wanted the film to just end right there; apparently, I'm a sucker for stories about exhausted soldiers eager to embrace the enemy (and also for alliteration and assonance). That's especially true when said stories involve choral duets sung in different languages—I had no idea that Japan had adopted "Home, Sweet Home," reworking it as "My Humble Cottage" (though apparently it also appears in Grave of the Fireflies, good thorough job Wiki-editors). 

'Tis but prologue, however...and so is the highly combustible sequence that follows, in which Mizushima is dispatched to persuade another Japanese unit to surrender. I assumed this mission would constitute the rest of the movie—ample fuel there, certainly—and confess that I was a bit disheartened when Mizushima winds up (from what we see, at least) as the sole survivor of the attack that he fails to prevent. Watching him emerge from a pile of corpses and throw himself down a gully in despair admittedly shakes the soul, but a few additional soldiers not killed wouldn't have been ruinous, whereas anything that smacks of narrative contrivance in this sober context does damage. Not too much, though, since this is all still just groundwork being laid for the story proper: Mizushima's conversion to pacifism/monkhood, juxtaposed with his former unit's efforts to find him and persuade him to return with them to Japan. Ichikawa opts to detail the former in flashback, which allows for powerfully disturbing imagery—bodies, bodies everywhere—but makes the reading of Mizushima's letter at the end feel redundant. (Though I'd hate to lose Ichikawa's oddly haunting shot of Mizushima's parrot being swallowed up by shadow as the boat gently rocks.) The film truly ends, as far as I'm concerned, with Mizushima's farewell song, which gorgeously bookends the opening and requires no explanation or followup. Apparently the source novel has a stronger focus on Japanese postwar guilt (despite having been written for children!), and Ichikawa falters a bit when he strives to honor that; onscreen, The Burmese Harp looks dutiful when exploring inhumanity's corrosive fallout, but becomes transcendent when demonstrating music's charms to soothe the savage (or bolster the crestfallen) breast. Actually hearing the harp makes a difference.

(Oh, and watch A Midnight Clear if you've never seen it. A real sleeper.)