Black Sun

As in The Warped Ones, Tamio Kawaji plays a jazz-crazed youth (Criterion’s DVD essay suggests it’s the same character, which may be the case although I wouldn’t say it’s firmly established… they do frequent the same bar, however, so maybe), this time a vagrant squatting in a bombed-out church.  When a wounded black GI on the lam (Chico Roland, also returning from Warped Ones) hides out in his pad, Kawaji is at first thrilled to have a genuine Negro in his presence, but racial tensions between them begin to surface.  One doesn’t expect a very complex statement on the plight of black Americans from a Japanese director — Spike Lee has nothing to worry about — but it is a sympathetic outlook with some intriguing nuances.  Kawaji in blackface dragging around Roland in whiteface as his “slave” is certainly bizarre, if nothing else.

One of the stronger elements is the blistering Max Roach score (whose album lends the film its title).  The track “Six Bits Blues” with vocals by Abbey Lincoln gets repeated many times throughout the movie… sometimes to the point where it gets tiresome, but it also underscores the film’s most moving scene.  Another highlight is Kurahara’s vision of Tokyo as an apocalyptic wasteland, a crumbling landscape of debris.  However, if the film has a weakness, it’s Roland.  Continuing in the tradition of terrible American performances in foreign productions, he’s usually pretty bad.  Although there are a few points where he pulls off a good moment, most of the time he’s either overdoing it or underdoing it.  And his hysterical wheezing, whispering and weeping often makes his dialogue incomprehensible.

I’m calling this the weakest of the Kurahara I’ve seen so far, but I’d definitely like to see it again sometime in a different frame of mind.  Its off-kilter tone is hard to pin down.  Rating: Good

IMDb