The Quiet Duel (Japan, 1949):(Shizukanaru Ketto) Jumbled and jagged, Akira Kurosawa's adolescent efforts grapple obsessively with regeneration in a society struggling to piece itself back together, and it's no accident the idea of healing pops up regularly -- razed-out postwar Japan is the perfect playground for the director's grudging humanism, though the same medical interest also makes a mid-career appearance later in the 19th-century scroll of Red Beard. Here, however, Toshiro Mifune is the idealist half of the duo, a callow doctor first seen at the operation table in 1944, a surgery all but thwarted by exhaustion, leaky roofs, power shortages and assorted rudimentary resources. Flash forward two years, and Mifune, now settled in a modestly stagy clinic, gives longtime fiancée Miki Sanjo the cold shoulder. The duel is a moral one, and the film abounds in images of isolation, characters' backs helplessly turned, people sitting side by side on a sofa with an abyss seemingly separating them. "Does war change people so much," Sanjo wonders plaintively to Takashi Shimura, surgeon-father and Kurosawa's go-to guy for mentor figures, but even he is unaware of his son's wartime secret. Accidentally dabbing into a patient's DV-infested blood, Mifune comes home syphilic but innocent, his purity intact despite the sullying grounds he was forced to tread -- a parable for Japan's collective conscience, coming off a lost, dirty war? In any case, the doc's haloed diligence soothes the misery of those around him, particularly dancer-turned-nurse Noriko Sengoku, who swings from nihilist almost-hooker to loving young mother upon getting wind of his sacrifice; such saintliness can be a pain, though, and Kurosawa stages a suffocatingly clumsy 5-minute take around the hero's tear-lubricated meltdown that locates the contemporary anxiety scarcely spotted behind Mifune's copyrighted badass grunting. With Kenjiro Uemura, and Chieko Nakakita. In black and white. --- Fernando F. Croce[capturas del ripeo VH-PROD]
No te lo tomes mal jose. Son sólo observaciones para ser un foro más homogeneo.
Bueno, he injertado la información del hilo duplicado de Sigurd con el nuevo ripeo, tanto en las fichas como en capturas y sinopsis.
Pido perdón por la duplicación de los temas.
