Review: Fires on the Plain

Kon Ichikawa’s The Burmese Harp burnished the filmmaker’s international reputation as a Renoiresque humanist.

Fires on the Plain
Photo: Edward Harrison

Ichikawa Kon’s 1956 film The Burmese Harp burnished the filmmaker’s international reputation as a Renoiresque humanist, but, in retrospect, the scabrous fury of 1959’s Fires on the Plain, his other antiwar tract, feels closer to the heart of the notoriously hard-to-pin-down Japanese director. Closer to the anguished sardonicism of Enjo or Odd Obsession than to the earlier film’s tenderness, it plays against the image of Ichikawa as a soothing optimist, opening with the protagonist, Private Tamura (Funakoshi Eiji), suddenly smacked across the face, though the slap could be directed toward the audience.

Japanese forces shrivel up as WWII nears its end in the Philippines, the tubercular soldier has returned from the dilapidated hospital only to be ordered back and given a grenade to blow himself up if turned away. Where The Burmese Harp took its delicate flow from the musical rhythms of the titular instrument, the narrative here is an implacable death march mirroring the gaunt, famished Tamura’s walking-corpse gait, a shuffle periodically jerked by macabre spasms. Along the way, he meets disbanded Imperial soldiers, horrified local villagers, and pulverizing American tanks; hellish visions (a mountain of skeletons next to a church, bodies scattered across a valley) pile up as the eponymous flames soon take on infernal intimations and the shadows on the characters’ hollowed-out faces come to resemble Kabuki makeup.

A surreally barbaric visualization of Ooka Shohei’s novel (adapted by Ichikawa’s wife, Wada Natto), Fires on the Plain also embodies the filmmaker’s compassionate and mordant sides, the two jostling impulses pithily embodied in a moment where a dying soldier thanks Tamura for his aid, with his sincere gratitude (“I won’t forget your kindness as long as I live”) promptly met with another character’s acrid reply (“That won’t be long”). In the film’s pitiless descent, cannibalism becomes the ultimate degradation, and ultimately there is a glimmer of hope in the way Tamura fights the temptation to eat “monkey flesh” his starved colleagues consume. His outrage may come from the weak gums that render him unable to chew the meat, but, in a vision of hell as appalling as Ichikawa’s, any hint of humanity is to be treasured.

Advertisement
Score: 
 Cast: Funakoshi Eiji, Takizawa Osamu, Mickey Curtis, Ushio Mantaro, Sazanaka Kyu, Hamaguchi Yoshihiro, Sano Asao, Tsukida Masaya, Hoshi Hikaru, Sugita Yasushi  Director: Ichikawa Kon  Screenwriter: Wada Natto  Distributor: Edward Harrison  Running Time: 104 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1959  Buy: Video

Fernando F. Croce

Fernando F. Croce is a San Francisco-based film writer whose work has been published in Film Comment, Reverse Shot, MUBI, and Fandor. He runs the website CinePassion.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.