Shohei Imamura's appetite for the ugly, the brutal, the painful, is matched this time by a fully justifying subject — the bombing of Hiroshima and its aftermath — and there is no sense here, as there is elsewhere, that he is having to go out of his way to cook up this menu and perversely revelling in it. The blast itself — the soundless flash, the wind, the dark cloud, the literal black rain — and the subsequent flight of survivors through the rubble are powerfully realized, and they comprise some of the most horrific images in contemporary film: the mother cradling an infant-shaped cinder, the fleshless little boy whose older brother refuses to recognize him till he examines the boy's belt buckle. (That the film is shot in black-and-white is a small mercy.) The post-war problem of finding a husband for a marriageable young woman tainted by the black rain — it's sort of an Ozu situation twisted with Nuclear Age neurosis — is inevitably less gripping than the opening section. (A couple of flashbacks to that time are rough attempts to re-tighten the grip.) But the concentration on a single family, bound to one another and cut off from others by their shared exposure to radiation, is a model of how a big subject can be approached modestly, with no presumption to "cover" it, but with the lid left askew for others to get in on it. A subject this big can be gone at many ways. And should be. Yoshiko Tanaka, Kazuo Kitamura. (1990) — Duncan Shepherd
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