This film feels like a story the great Akira Kurosawa wanted to tell. Four grandchildren are staying with their aged grandma outside of Nagasaki. She is a survivor of the bomb in 1945, but her husband, a teacher, perished that day. The grandmother's children are in Hawaii visiting a relative and her husband, who is played by Richard Gere in a fine understated performance. Clark (Gere) and his wife have her father living with them, and they claim he is one of Grandma's brothers, but she cannot remember him. The film becomes a mediation on the war, specifically the devastating effect on Nagasaki. In one particularly touching scene everyone gathers at the school where Grandpa perished that day in August. There is a monument there built for the children who dies there that day, a sculpture of mangled monkey bars. The film is slow moving, meditative, but moving in its best moments. While not among Kurosawa's best work (its virtually impossible to stand up to such greatness), this last film of his is a touching tribute to a part of his life (and so many others) that is both easy to forget, but also impossible not to remember. The acting is uniformly very good, especially the four children and Grandma. Recommended.
Review of Rhapsody in August
