Japan, 1988
Directed by Imamura Shôhei
With Kitamura Kazuo (Shizuma Shigematsu), Ichihara Etsuko (Shizuma Shigeko), Tanaka Yoshiko (Yasuko), Ishida Keisuke (Yuichi)
This is about quiet lives it seems: in a slightly grainy black and white, with the light of sky remarkably bright, a family is pictured moving around the countryside in a truck and then attending a kind of ceremony at a vast house, with the shot compositions carefully highlighting the somehow worried, puzzled face of a young woman who may not feel that comfortable in the time and place she is now living.
They are not: the following sequence focuses on a middle-aged man in uniform making his way through the streets of Hiroshima, his voice explaining what he is doing and who he is. Shizuma Shigematsu must help a local factory to get running despite the constraints of the current war.
But that morning he won’t be able to reach his workplace: a bomb is blowing away the passengers off the train, producing a huge, mushroom-like cloud that stun the people back in the countryside house. The next minutes are as harrowing as shots could be on a big screen, when cinema is tasked to convey shocking and definitely traumatic events. The young woman in the countryside is taken back to Hiroshima in a boat soon to be drenched in the titular black rain while Shigematsu is already back home, or rather what is left of it, helping his wife Shigeko pack up belongings before trying to make it to the factory in the hope it will be a safe place. The young woman, who is Shigematsu’s niece Yasuko, arrives just in time to go along with them.
But what they would see upset and frighten them deeply: the charred bodies mingling with heaps of rubble and above all the badly maimed, disfigured, burned beyond recognition bodies of those who did not die on the spot, wandering for help, plus the occasional face of insanity. The camera never flinches, neither does it take too lachrymose a position to capture the victims of the first atomic bomb ever to be dropped. “Kuroi ame – Black Rain” sounds painstakingly realistic, clearly well-documented, grisly bearing witness to the historical tragedy, a fresh look in fact at terrible images that the Japanese cinema has already shot – those scenes bring back to memory the poignant, groundbreaking effort of Sekigawa Hideo when he shot “Hiroshima” in 1953.
It does not last. True, more horrible images of this little family’s tour in a town turned into inferno among people reduced to excruciating physical pain and deformities would later feature in the film, twice exactly, one time in a rather long spell and the other time only briefly. After the long harrowing sequence in the town a few minute after the explosion a cut moves the narrative forwards out of the blue. A few years have passed and Shigematsu, his wife and niece now live in another part of the Japanese countryside. The film becomes a quiet chronicle of the life of those survivors and people around them, keen on capturing the small facts of their daily routines with some humor. The plot could look like a comedy of sorts about marriage, with her eldest parents anxious about getting Yasuko hooked but the woman unhurried to find a lover – it is reminiscent of a Ozu Yasujirô’s film. These features remind how close and sympathetic of rural life and humble folks director Imamura Shôhei has been in his career and his bond to Ozu’s oeuvre.
But Imamura is also a man keen on exploring darkest aspects of his fellow countrymen and his nation. And that comedy of matchmaking has not a funny cause, unfolding in the long shadow cast by the tragedy of August 6, 1945. Shigematsu and the friend who offered to be a matchmaker struggle to find a fiancé because there is the suspicion even the black rain could have endangered Yasuko’s health – the first time the film comes back to the explosion is caused by Shigematsu’s reading his niece’s diary and his own one to reassure himself about the fact she could not have suffered the same troubles than those who were so close to ground zero. While showing, till the last, harrowing minutes, the old man clinging to this hope the young gal could be spared by illness, the film emphasizes how those who been victims of the A bomb are set apart from the rest of the community. They got help and benefit from medical support and welfare aid, of course. But they are away from their native town and actually any town and must sometimes hear remarks that sound more like reproaches than anything else (it is later claimed that such a remark by an outspoken middle-aged woman was just an instance of her teasing a man she likes but the words still hurt as others may think the same in a far less benevolent way about people who are now invalids).
They are rightful members of the community but their lives would never be, and cannot be the same as for others. Illness hovers above them as an inescapable and unmitigated doom – tellingly, the matchmaker gets a stroke as Yasuko is winding up the grandfather’s clock of the house, allowing the camera to shoot a dramatic, impressive high-angle shot. As time flies by, the entourage of Shigematsu fall victim of the health consequences of the explosion, one after another, including his wife whose last hours are a nightmare, the woman becoming restive and mad as ghosts of her husband’s friends who have already passed away sit near the sliding doors leading to her bed. Death extends slowly but surely its grip around Shigematsu and eventually threatens to grasp Yasuko.
The last part of the story indeed graphically illustrates the tragic and gradual loss of health and energy of Yasuko. She becomes a sad, disturbing example of resignation, a young woman who has embraced the fact she would not have the same life as other girls of her generation and quietly accept her fate with a slightly disturbing easiness, despite the love a young man of the village feels for her – it is remarkable that the only young men she sympathizes with and enjoys talking is a former soldier who has been traumatized by fighting: Yuichi cannot do anything else than carving statues out of stones and becomes frenzied every time he hears a car motor running, rushing on the main road to keep the vehicle from advancing. Only other folks deeply shocked and hurt by the war, here on the psychological level, can really relate to the Hiroshima victims.
The quiet life suggested by the first shots in the new environment Shigematsu and his relatives were sent to in the aftermath of the war, and that so many anecdotes and beautiful shots on nature seemed to illustrate blissfully, has always been an illusion. The horror did not stop with the fateful day but poisons life and people forever, a pervading threat that cut shorts happy moments and an impurity that challenges the nation and stands in stark contrast with the tranquil, healthy, vital flows of life around the victims – like those fish whose growing numbers fill the rivers. That is the sobering lesson the film draws from the facts and movingly, intelligently, sincerely tells the audience.