Solntse (2005)

English title: The Sun

The film portrays the emperor of Japan, depicting the events in his life during a few days following the dropping of atom bombs in Japan.

Borges once said (I am not completely sure whether he was not quoting someone, but I think he was not) that defeat is aesthetically superior to victory. I think this is, at least in part, what drives this film. Unfortunately, that thought alone cannot a good film make: it takes some talent to it, which the filmmakers, at least in this instance, do not display in sufficient amounts. Another notion which may have inspired them is Arendt's "banality of evil", since the film seems to place great importance to the intimate, the quirky -- in short the small. Not having read that aforementioned philosopher, though, I always wondered how her report about a Nazi bureaucrat came to be regarded as pertinent to evil in all its materializations and agencies. Here, for instance, a viewer might have a hard time believing that the man who commanded a whole nation through atrocity after atrocity was "a mere child". Perhaps what I have written so far may produce the impression that I loathed the film, and I want to correct this right away, for it has some level of professionalism to it, and even manages to achieve a certain level of storytelling coherence, but that is as far as it goes. Overall, it is a pretty poor film.

Rating: 41