Say what ?

Yesterday evening I watched, for the first time since months or dare I say years, an old re run of a film (I usually manage to read a couple of pages before I fall into oblivion let alone watch an entire film). It was the Somerset, humoristic cop thriller Hot Fuzz, a film I last saw still living in Sweden. Then I laughed, enjoyed and nodded understandingly to the plot, but I actually didn’t have a clue that this film is a piece of soc. realism with a humoristic tone. Now after living 5 years in Somerset, seeing that film again made my laugh choke in my throat. Because, the crazy ideas, I thought then, of the director have proven not to be invented, the genius of character, as I thought then, are replicas of true characters in the Somerset country side. It was so precise that we could, my husband and I, set names from our lives, on the characters “look that is Frank, look that is exactly like Karen, look that is so like . . .” And even the relationships in the film, or the different groups, un canny !

Unfortunately, what that has done is to strip the poor director from his laurels and expose him not as a brilliant, astute story teller of a director, but as a humoristic documentary film maker, not that it matters but it matters when it comes to the piece of film, art you might call it, and what it wants to communicate.

To take an example, do we, as Westerners really understand Kurosawa’s films? How can we understand the art work of a director who doesn’t speak the same symbolic language as us? How can we understand the issues raised in these films since our lives are so different to those of Kurosawa? And does this matter?

Well it does matter when a director has a singular point to make, when the whole film is based on that point and only on that point. Those tend to be the simpler forms of communication (read South American soup operas a la Esmeralda !!) and then you need to know exactly what is being meant or you get hopelessly lost. But when there is a giant of a director (read Kurosawa)  with such a profound storytelling, with such epic way of telling the story, even the blind would find something to relate to him.  His story telling transcends all cultural and philosophical hindrances (how is another story and something better left to the more clever) and goes into the realm of beauty.  And beauty is the language of the heart and not the mind. The mind will find its story no matter what, and no matter what the director intended. And the heart, as we all know, is blind and will not adhere to dictate.

So where does this leave us? No, we can’t understand Kurosawa, I do not think, and no it doesn’t matter. What we get from his works of art is beauty and a message that our mind puts together for us based on our lives and our world. Kurosawa speaks to us in the language of truth, profoundness and sincerity and those are universal, human virtues, and that we can understand no matter where we come from. And when it comes to Hot Fuzz, I enjoyed it in Sweden when I saw it and I enjoyed it now, but on other premises.

I do not, I feel I have to state, for one moment imply that Somerset is as remote as Japan (although sometimes speaking to the local farmer, I feel like I’m coming from the moon, and I find myself searching desperately for a dictionary) but it does take a while to learn the ways of communicating and the ways of living in this similar, yet, very different culture. To be honest, it takes the same sort of effort meeting new friends or relations as well . . . and some of my friends still do not know what I am saying when I speak. Maybe I should change my name to Esmeralda ?