Beginnings and Endings. - Review - movie review

National Review, Sept 25, 2000 by John Simon

Philippe Torreton of the Comedie Francaise, these days Tavernier's favorite leading man, has a face and body language that convey Daniel's fundamental innocence and experience-hardened practicality to lovably pigheaded perfection. He is splendidly supported by Maria Pitaresi as Valeria, and everybody else, including local amateurs pungent in their bit parts. But this is a film that does not conform to American expectations, and may be short-lived on our screens. If you can possibly catch It All Starts Today, do so today. Tomorrow may be too late.

--A sad disappointment is Madadayo, the great Akira Kurosawa's 30th and last film, which he made at age 83 as his own epitaph, five years before his death in 1998. Though written by himself, it is based on a novel derived from a true story. We are in 1943, Japan is beginning to lose the war, and Professor Uchida, a beloved university German teacher, decides to retire and write books. He has a devoted wife, and his loving students, four of them in particular, try to make his modest circumstances pleasanter.

When his house is destroyed in an air raid, Uchida and his wife make do in a cramped hut. Eventually, the students build him a dream house, complete with doughnut-shaped pond in which the fish can swim uninterruptedly. When his beloved alley cat disappears, the students make frantic efforts to retrieve it. And they keep coming to visit him, though he would prefer being left alone. Every year on his birthday, they throw him a banquet, during which they ritually ask, "Mahda-kai?" (Are you ready to go hence?) to which he answers, "Madadayo" (Not yet). The years go by and Uchida falls ill at one of these banquets, to which by now students bring children and grandchildren. Rushed home, he has a symbolic dream about a favorite childhood game.

The film is enormously static, and its trivial events fail to acquire universal stature. One gets a sense neither of the great teacher nor of the successful writer, only of the quirky eccentric. Uchida's not-very-profound remarks are received as sublime philosophy, his feeble jokes elicit bursts of laughter and lengthy applause. Even the actors, the leading one included, are less than winning, though Kyoko Kagawa is touching as the wife. It is a film that suffers from a sort of arterial sclerosis, and however much I treasure Kurosawa, there were few of its 134 minutes I could not have easily dispensed with.