No. What makes The Eternal Zero worth watching is that it’s a Japanese view of the Japanese side in World War II, and that’s immensely refreshing.
The story starts with the discovery by a young woman and her younger brother that the man they have always called grandfather, is in fact the second husband of their grandmother and the stepfather, rather than natural father, of their mother. Their blood grandfather, Kyuzo Miyabe, was an airman of the Japanese Imperial Navy, killed in a 1945 Kamikaze mission. His role gives the film its title: he flew Mitsubishi Zero fighters.
The Mitsubishi Zero |
From then on, therefore, he sees every life lost as a waste. Some of the finest young Japanese men are being recruited as pilots; he believes that they have much more to contribute to Japan alive, after the fighting is over, than dead in a lost cause. That view only intensifies when he finds himself training these men to take part in Kamikaze missions.
Sacrificial victims in a hopeless cause |
So how did a man committed to surviving manage to die as a Kamikaze pilot? Well, that’s the central irony of the film, and you’ll have to watch it to find out. In my view, the explanation it gave worked and wrapped up the plot well. If, perhaps, a little cheesily…
Still, well worth watching for all that.
Departures – a film I keep coming back to |
Departures is the tale of a young cellist with a Tokyo symphony orchestra that goes bankrupt. He’s forced to find a new job, for which he heads back to the old family home he has inherited, out in the country, where he was brought up by his mother after his father left them. He takes a job with a company called ‘Departures’. However, it isn’t a travel agency, which would have been honourable, but a company concerned with that other, final departure we all have to face, to an undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller ever returns.
The handling of the dead is, apparently, regarded as far from honourable, leading to terrible shame when the truth finally comes out.
The film deals with issues of life as well as of death, it handles loss and joy, shame and vindication, with sensitivity and poignancy. It explores what it is to be a parent, a partner or a child. It shows how colleagues can react with loyalty and support. Above all, it shows how the sensitive and, in this instance, supremely skilful treatment of a dead body can contribute to making harrowing loss bearable.
A bereavement accompanied can be more bearable |
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