(1989)
4.5
Jonathan Crow
Few films have captured the horror of the atomic explosion over Hiroshima and the cruelty of the bomb's effects as devastatingly as Shohei Imamura's masterful Kuroi Ame. Adapted from the prize-winning novel by Masuji Ibuse, which was in turn adapted from the diaries of Ibuse's friend Shigematsu Shizuma, Kuroi opens with a harrowingly realistic depiction of how, in an instant, a thriving city can become a surrealistic hell of burning buildings, freakish weather, and charred flesh. Shooting in stark black-and-white, Imamura confronts yet rivets the audience with one atomic horror after another, until the viewer is overwhelmed. Suddenly, the film fast-forwards to the tranquility of the immediate post-war era, only to reveal the long-term terror of the bomb. Protagonist Shigematsu suffers from radiation sickness, which renders the seemingly robust middle-aged man weak and without energy; his friends suddenly keel over dead from the disease. Yet, not content with only illustrating the human devastation of the bomb, Imamura focuses with almost equal ferocity on the backward societal prejudices that bomb survivors endure. Five years after the blast, villagers complain about the laziness of the enfeebled bomb survivors, while Shigematsu's niece Yasuko, who escaped Hiroshima without apparent injury, cannot find a husband in spite of clean bill of health. More restrained than such Imamura classics as The Pornographers (1966) and Vengeance is Mine (1979), this film still bears his imprint: a fascination with the fringes of Japanese society; strong-willed, overtly sexual women; and his signature earthy humor. This film, which swept the Japanese Academy Awards and received a prize at the Cannes Film Festival, stands as both a great film by a cinematic master and a searing testament of the atomic age.
Black Rain on AllMovie
Black Rain (1989)
