--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Jaime N. Christley" <j_christley@...>
wrote:
>
> But not as much as RETRIBUTION.

There is a moment in this film that has really stuck with me. Koji
Yakusho is chasing a suspect along the roof of a building, and Kurosawa
chooses one of his typical high-angle, remote shots that both emphasize
and contain the geometry of the space. At one edge of the frame, the
suspect says, "Don't come any closer or I'll jump." Yakusho approaches,
and the dude does indeed jump: the seeming emotionality of the situation
is pretty much suppressed by the camera's distance and the acting style,
so that a weird sense of the routine surrounds the leap. The jumper
vanishes below the bottom of the frame, and I thought to myself, "I
guess there was a net down there to catch the actor." But after a short
delay Kurosawa tilts down, and the jumper is lying on the ground, dazed!
Did the actor really jump off that one-story building? Or did the
people holding the net get out of there really really quickly? I can't
tell. There's something uncanny about the combination of potential
horror, the weirdly bland presentation, and that pan that notarizes the
integrity of the space.

My problems with the film, as with many Kurosawa films, have to do with
the story - or, more accurately, with the dramaturgy. Mike Kerpan
opined that Kurosawa is not about story, but the stories he uses have a
lot in common. In RETRIBUTION, as in other Kurosawa films, the
supernatural events are organized in such a way that they seem to be
intended to elucidate a character's internal conflict, which is a
time-worn and honorable approach - but then the story winds up having a
stubborn, crazy literalness about its supernatural events, as if it were
a scary campfire story intended only to divert. - Dan