Waiting for the Barbarians (9 page)

When there are reminders of what we might call “big historical moments,” they are the more powerful for being so fleeting, so subtle. At one point, the narrator enters a room that, he is told, is forbidden, and that is clearly meant to evoke the Great Patriotic War, as Russians call World War II; in it—as a fierce winter storm suddenly rages outside the windows—we see a man in mid-twentieth-century garb making coffins (the room had apparently once been used to make gilded frames for paintings). Later on, we overhear an anxious Empress Alexandra murmuring “I thought I heard shots” to a nun, as she glides down a hallway toward her tea party. As indeed she will, one day.

These vignettes representing official history, as well as the tableaux showing us what we could call unofficial history, are punctuated by the jarringly surreal moments that give the movie its dreamlike quality. A woman on the perilous boundary between middle and old age gesticulates suggestively before a painting of a voluptuous odalisque; that blind woman gives a sensitive account of a number of works of art to a visitor who can see; a pair of handsome modern-day sailors sniff intently at an oil painting after Custine has remarked on
its wonderful smell. (Sokurov’s camera tends to linger on the faces of pretty young men, as much in his several documentaries about soldiers as in his narrative films. In one eerily memorable scene in
Russian Ark
, Custine looms over a handsome, cowering youth in a corner of a gallery, wordlessly threatening him—with what, it’s not quite possible to know.)

Indeed, the two most beautiful images in this movie of so many beautiful images seem to have no apparent meaning at all. In the first, a plump and elderly Catherine II escapes from a stifling room—she’s been showing some children how to curtsey—and runs into a snow-covered courtyard; the camera follows her as she runs, with increasing speed, through a path in the snow, her gray satin train trailing behind her, a wordless shot that lasts an uncannily long time. (Sokurov likes to dwell at unnatural length on certain images, a technique that at once induces reverie and focuses attention.) In the second, at the end of the movie, a stream of richly dressed courtiers—the ones from the Persian ceremony, apparently—stream down a magnificent ceremonial double staircase. The river of courtiers, Pushkin among them, keeps swelling, it seems, and the amazed camera, which is following them down the steps, keeps spinning back and up to capture the swirling movement of the people, the stairway itself, this moment.

As these sumptuously attired characters begin to crowd and overwhelm the screen, the camera cuts away to a small, oddly glowing doorway. Beyond it, we see, is not the city of St. Petersburg but a white, icy ocean of some kind. This small moment, at last, explains the film’s title: for as we now see, we are indeed aboard an “ark”—a cinematic vessel that has rescued, “as best it could,” apparently random moments from history, and that will float forever in an endlessly circling stream of time itself.

If
Russian Ark
offers tantalizing glimpses of people whom history has forgotten, as well as of men and women who seem very small and vulnerable in comparison to the roles they were required to play, then
The Sun
puts Sokurov’s special emphases to excellent use as it explores the gap between historical grandiosity and human weakness at a moment in history when that gulf was most glaringly exposed: the day on which Hirohito consented to acknowledge that he was not, in fact, a god.

The film, like
Moloch
, uses the events of one day as the armature on which to build up a subtle account of the disproportion between a man and his historical persona. (
The Sun
also shares
Moloch
’s dour palette of washed-out browns, greens, and grays, in stark contrast to the opulent colors that enrich
Russian Ark
.) When it opens, we find Hirohito, now living in a bunker beneath his palace, at breakfast, being given his day’s agenda by his chamberlain. Nothing is left to chance: after his ten o’clock meeting with his military cabinet and his noon visit to his lab (the late emperor, now technically known as Shôwa, was an accomplished marine biologist with a number of scholarly publications to his name), he is informed when he may nap and when he may have time for “private thoughts.” This is a man who, it seems, is unable to function on his own, outside of the structure of court life—a point that is wonderfully made toward the end of the film when, as he leaves a meeting with General MacArthur, he confronts for the first time a door that isn’t being opened for him. Bemused, he tentatively reaches down, grabs the handle, and opens it himself, something he has clearly never done before.

And like
Moloch
, this film uses an undue focus on the autocrat’s body as a means of underscoring the difference between his public persona and his private self. The former is the object of ardent ministrations by everyone but the emperor himself, who seems if anything eager to be a normal human being. Early on, when he wryly
remarks to his valet that “the very last Japanese may be myself”—the valet had commented, apropos of a radio report that the Americans are just outside Tokyo, that as long as there is one Japanese left standing the Americans will never set foot in the palace—the servant exclaims in horror that “it is outlandish to assert that the emperor could be human.” To which a plaintive Hirohito replies, “But my body is the same as yours.” The ordinariness of his body is strongly linked, in the script, to the ordinariness of Hirohito’s inner life and emotions: at one point his disgusted observation that his breath lately “has a bad smell and a bad taste” leads seamlessly into the equally unhappy assertion that “no one loves me except for my wife and my older son.”

The action of the film, such as it is—Sokurov is never really interested in strong narratives—follows the events that will make the humble truth of the emperor’s observation plain even to the most fanatically loyal of his household. Again and again, he shows himself blind to the realities of the historical situation. During his morning military meeting, he responds to what is clearly a crushingly dire report from his minister of the army by quoting a poem written by his grandfather, the emperor Meiji: “Sea to the north and to the south, to the west and to the east / waves whirl up.” This the emperor interprets, to the obvious anguish of his perspiring ministers, to mean that “peace on favorable terms to my people is the only peace; let the sea continue to rage.” (Hirohito really did recite a poem by Meiji at an imperial conference, but it was clearly pacifist in its implications.)

Later on, clad in a white coat in his laboratory, he delivers an ecstatic monologue about the virtues of the hermit crab—an animal to which he bears an uncanny resemblance: “the crab can cover himself … it lives at shallow depths and doesn’t migrate very far”—which leads to a grotesquely self-serving account of the reasons for Japanese military aggression in Asia:

It is not the last time in the film that the emperor, who seems to grow smaller and more awkward during his final hours as a god, rather pathetically attempts to deflect any accountability for his interventions in history. Later on, when he finally meets with a bemused and condescending MacArthur, he seems to think that his assertion that he wasn’t actually Hitler’s “friend” will absolve him of responsibility. The crab can cover himself.

Hirohito’s interest in marine biology provides Sokurov with a fruitful thematic and visual leitmotif: images of fish glide through the film, marking its most emotionally and politically significant moments.

The most striking of these is in a sequence representing a daydream the emperor has while resting alone in his study. He’s been leafing through some photo albums: family albums, whose pictures he tenderly kisses, as well as albums containing photos of Hollywood stars—one of whom, Charlie Chaplin, he will be compared to later in the film. Suddenly he has a vision of American bombers morphing into wiggling, demonic catfish that rain fire on his dominions. (Earlier, before urging the army to continue fighting, Hirohito the biologist observes that the
na-muzu
, or catfish, protects itself by sinking to the bottom of the water.) Before, his disquisition on hermit crabs
was the vehicle for our appreciation of his historical arrogance; now, only after his beloved fish are conflated with bombers, does the enemy’s destructiveness become real to him. This is the moment when he acknowledges defeat. All this inspires Hirohito to attempt a poem of his own, a cliché verse that inadvertently echoes certain sentiments we find in
Russian Ark
: “The spring
sakura
[cherry blossom] and the January snow,” begins an early version, “neither lasts long.”

The marine motif is present even in the countenance of Hirohito, to whom Sokurov has given a peculiar tic: over and over again he purses his lips and moves them laboriously, soundlessly—the face you’d make if you had to act out “fish out of water” in a game of charades. For he is, indeed, a fish out of water, a man who on this day seems at home neither in the divine nor in the human element.

Another recurrent motif that suggests the devolution of Hirohito from god to man is an embarrassed physicality; Sokurov stages a number of excruciatingly awkward encounters between the emperor and his subordinates. There is the marvelous opening scene with the valet, during which the old man has great trouble buttoning his master’s shirt, and an exquisitely anguished scene in which there is tense and prolonged confusion about where to seat the director of a scientific institute who has come at Hirohito’s request in order to discuss a question of long-standing interest to the emperor: Could his grandfather Meiji have seen the northern lights, as he once claimed? No, says the scientist, with anguished embarrassment, after which the emperor observes that the poor man probably hasn’t eaten all day, and sends him off with a chocolate bar, a gift from the victorious Americans.

The emperor’s cluelessness is underscored in two deftly tragicomic scenes with MacArthur, during which the Japanese keeps parrying the American’s blunt questions with replies that are either dazzlingly evasive or staggeringly banal:

There is, too, a splendid scene in which the emperor agrees to have his picture taken by a group of US Army photographers, who react with dismay, and then amusement, to the unprepossessing, Chaplinesque figure in a suit and a fedora who answers to the title of “emperor.” They had thought that his chamberlain, magnificently attired in a morning coat and tails, must be this august figure.

And finally, one of the best scenes that Sokurov has ever filmed: the climactic encounter between Hirohito and his wife, the empress Nagako, who has been brought back to Tokyo from her family’s refuge in the countryside. (This indulgence was granted Hirohito once he recorded the speech in which he relinquished his divine status.) The two spouses come together in a small room and there ensues a beautifully staged bit of business about the empress’s hat, which she has trouble removing and which her physically shy and emotionally awkward husband finally frees of her lacquered hairdo, with some difficulty. The clunky physicality of this business, our awareness of the tension between his human self and the elaborate protocols of behavior of which he has now been stripped and without which he seems helpless to move—the scene concludes with the emperor rather woodenly laying his head on his wife’s breast and keeping it there, once again a bit too long—is the final proof of the claim he had made at the beginning of his day: that his body is like everyone else’s.

The point is not to defend Hirohito by somehow humanizing him, as some critics have claimed. If anything,
The Sun
makes us all too aware, not for the first time in this director’s work, of the catastrophic
disproportion between the character of a man and the nature of the role he played in history. Sokurov’s eccentrically beautiful and finally overwhelming film concludes by emphasizing that disproportion—one that, in the end, doesn’t escape even his own wife. In their final moments together before they run out of the room to see their children—and after being told by the chamberlain, pointedly, that the young man who recorded the emperor’s speech has committed hara-kiri—Hirohito delightedly announces to Nagako that he has abandoned his divinity. “Basically, I felt uneasy … not good at all” is the lumpy way he sums up his motivation. To celebrate this moment of “freedom,” as he calls it, he recites for her the finished version of the poem he had started earlier in the afternoon: