High and Low, by Akira Kurosawa
Japan's paradigm of visual metaphor
In the pantheon of influential directors, Akira Kurosawa might stand alone. Noted as the biggest influence for Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Steven Spielberg, Kurosawa introduced the world to a new way of seeing. Orson Welles, Satyajit Ray, and Sidney Lumet have all called Kurosawa the godfather of all directors. Stanley Kubrick routinely insisted that the Japanese auteur was the very, very best, and George Lucas has publicly called Kurosawa’s work his greatest inspiration. His films consistently appear on every sort of “Greatest of All Time” list you can think of, but for many in the twenty-first century, he feels incredibly inaccessible. Trapped behind distribution red tape, a language barrier and nearly seventy years of datedness, approaching and engaging with his work is quite a challenge. Early this year, I gave myself that very quest, to dive in, head-first, to the catalog of Akira Kurosawa. It was daunting, it was at times remarkably strange, but in the end it was overwhelmingly emotional, exciting, and enlightening. Every Kurosawa fan has their favorites among his work - many claim that it’s Seven Samurai, there are an equal number of Rashomon and Ikiru admirers, but it took until the calendar turned to 1963 for me to realize I had found mine - Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low.
Call and Response
Kurosawa is probably best known for his period pieces that depict the later Edo period (1603 - 1868) in Japan, rife with stories of ronin, samurai and immense amounts of drama. Occasionally, he turned his camera towards the present, painting stories of modern-day Japan with the same dramatic brushstrokes that he used in his historical works. High and Low is very much a product of the 20th century, and it is a story of a capitalist society fighting with the product of its own size. Kingo Gondo, played by Toshiro Mifune (who is the subject worthy of thousands of words more than will be dedicated here), is a wealthy executive of the National Shoe Company, working to complete a takeover of the company’s majority stake. We enter the world amidst a fierce debate between factions of Gondo’s company: one group would rather make cheap, repeatable products with low-quality, while the other, led by our protagonist, prefers continuing to make high-quality and low-volume shoes. Gondo has put everything on this bet, that customers will prefer a luxurious good even if profits are lower to start - he has quite literally put his mortgage into the takeover fund.
It is not inherently clear if we are supposed to like Mifune’s character at the outset here - the debate on low-cost vs. high-quality is not really even a “right vs. wrong” for consumers, as it is certainly clear that the end-user is not the first thought for any of the National Shoe Company executives. They talk in circles about profits and market share, and we are dehumanized within minutes of the film starting. We meet Gondo’s wife, his child, and his chauffeur, which do nothing to make him even slightly more relatable to us. In typical Kurosawa fashion, though, we are thrown into the narrative in a single moment: Gondo’s son is out playing hide-and-seek with the chauffeur’s son, and the family’s phone rings. It is a kidnapper, informing Kingo Gondo that his son has been taken, demanding a ransom. No matter the occupation, the economic background or the seeming lack of any real humanity, we feel for Gondo and his wife. Their young child has been taken, and their world thrown into chaos. They hang up, and contemplate how to deal with a world they never thought they would be in - until their son walks back into the house:
JUN: "Did you call me, Mom? What's the matter?"
GONDO: "What is this? A practical joke? Jun, where's Shinichi?"
JUN: "I hid like you said, but he never came. Some sheriff!"The kidnapper had mistakenly taken Shinichi, the son of Gondo’s chauffeur. A man far less wealthy, and far less powerful than Gondo, and centrally, a man of the people. The man, Aoki, falls to his knees in despair. He clearly does not have the money to pay the ransom, and we begin to question who the responsibility falls upon. Should Gondo pay? The boy was thought to be his son, the heir to a multi-million dollar company, and was taken from Gondo’s own front yard. If Gondo does agree to pay, though, his future at the National Shoe Company will be out of the question - he will be broke, unable to complete the takeover, all for another man’s son. This question drives the first act of the film, and it is one that Kurosawa is extending to a far greater debate in modern society. Is it the responsibility of the few to care for the many? Gondo is the only one who can afford the ransom payment, but he will lose personal fortune and gain at the expense of a man with far fewer financial aspirations. Japan in the 1960s was a rebuilding society, but one that was clearly on the path to industrial modernity. Economic disparity was growing by the second, as the millionaire tycoons got further and further from the lifestyle of the common people.
In the end, Gondo falls on the side of compassion, and agrees to pay the ransom. He is not necessarily motivated by looking out for his fellow man, but by hard-nosed convincing from his assistant - if Gondo pays the ransom, the people of Japan will look favorably upon him and support his takeover of the National Shoe Company. This decision, like all made by Kingo Gondo, is made with dollar signs in his eyes. Kurosawa is blurring the Venn diagram of the capitalist hierarchy, forcing us to like this man who has every primary intention that we should hate. This is hard to do for any protagonist, and Gondo’s internal conflict drives the remainder of the narrative in a way that is remarkably intriguing.
The second act of the film is the “moving” part of the story, typical of most Kurosawa pieces. He gives us exposition in an instant, takes us on a wild ride, and lets us simmer on the meaning of it all in his conclusions. Gondo, with aid from the police captain, played by Japan’s other leading man Tatsuya Nakadai, agrees to the kidnapper’s conditions, taking two briefcases filled with bank notes onto a cross-country train. In a thrilling sequence, we learn that the kidnapper is not actually on the train with our heroes, but waiting at a river crossing, inaccessible without jumping from the locomotive itself - Gondo has to drop the briefcases out of the window at the precise moment that the train crosses a bridge. Despite numerous moments of uncertainty, Gondo does it, and the police get photographs of the perpetrators receiving the money. They are unable to do any sort of apprehension, but they at least have some sort of lead. The train stops, the boy is found safe, and our story is seemingly over… right?
Aoki, along with his son, take on a rogue mission of attempting to locate where Shinichi was being held - the father begs the boy to recall directions down unknown streets, through neighborhoods that Gondo would have never trekked. They do eventually find the hideout, and with the help of the police, infiltrate it. Within, they do not find a cunning mastermind, but rather two lifeless bodies - the accomplices of our kidnapper. A husband and wife, found to be overdosed on heroin, are the only remaining artifacts of the crime. In a moment, we have seen the other side of the modern world - desperation, addiction and true desolation characterize a population that Gondo has never even thought about. His consumers, the people he needs to buy his products, live in a world that he can not even imagine. These two are fairly clearly not the kidnapper - they were being used by whoever demanded Gondo’s ransom. Clues lead the investigation to a local hospital, where the real perpetrator is revealed -a young medical intern.
Our third act wraps this exciting narrative up in a not-so-neat way, leaving questions that hit hard on a society that has never thought to answer them. Japan’s archaic kidnapping laws made it so that there is not really a crime to prosecute due to Shinichi being found safe. The ransom was voluntarily paid, not taken, and the young intern has seemingly wriggled himself off of the hook. That is, outside of the two dead bodies he has left at his hideout. The police lay a trap in the local newspaper - a story detailing the kidnapping, describing the finding of two alive accomplices. They fabricate a note to the intern, written from the perspective of the deceased, demanding more heroin in return for their silence to the authorities. In a panic, the kidnapper returns to the scene of the crime and is caught red-handed, attempting to administer more heroin to the already-dead bodies. Gondo is lauded by the public for his efforts, is rewarded the majority share of the company, and the kidnapper faces a life in prison for his crimes.
With this, Kurosawa gives us a melancholic sunset over a land known for the opposite. The Land of the Rising Sun, a place of opportunity and luxury, a nation that was rebuilding faster than any other in the 20th century, was facing the stark reality that a majority of its citizens had been forgotten. The child returned to his father, yes, but Gondo was smacked with a harsh realization that Japan is not the glittering portrait he could see from his hilltop mansion. Instead, the film took him into back alleys, into landfills, into dilapidated, ramshackle neighborhoods filled with the dregs of society, and into the real Japan - one of great isolation.
A Thousand Words
High and Low is a long film, for 1963 standards - sitting at 142 minutes, this is Akira Kurosawa’s eighth-longest feature, and the narrative it weaves certainly tangles its way through a huge amount of plot-driven allegory. But to me, this is special for reasons far beyond its colossal script. More than the acting, more than the story, with High and Low, Kurosawa put together an absolute marvel in visual metaphor. I have certainly waxed endlessly about the “Asian filmmaking tradition”, an art form that is uniquely constructed when compared to most Hollywood works of similar repertoire, but this is the ultimate version of it. Japanese cinema, at its core, is about holistic storytelling. American films historically tell stories in a chronological, heavily edited way, and their Japanese contemporaries took far more liberties with camera movement, disruptive timelines and most importantly, visual metaphor.
This is something that is easy to explain in hindsight but remarkable when created in spontaneity. Every single shot of High and Low is telling a story - the film can be watched with no audio, with no script, and the lessons are clear. There have been contemporary directors that excel in this style - Bong Joon-ho, Kogonada, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi come to mind - but Kurosawa is the grandfather of it all. The first example I think is important to share is the one that is most crucial to the narrative - the Gondo residence. He lives on top of a hill, overlooking the entire city, in what can only be described as a palace compared to the slums below. The kidnapper looked, every single day, atop the hill where Gondo lived and envied in the obscene luxury. How can someone rise out of the poverty that is seemingly endless, and create a symbol of individualism only to mock the rest of us? This is what drove the intern to take the boy - jealousy, envy, and shock at the extreme disparity. We see this house in a number of shots that tell that story instantly. It is so clear what the story is, without any other clues, when we look at the Gondo house.
Even the police have this realization, and Kurosawa keeps enforcing it throughout the film. Every shot of the house, and every shot of Gondo really, is seen from below. We are constantly looking up at this man that has only attained recognition through financial status. We are forced to watch his heroism from below, with the rest of society, in a way that feels almost inescapable. It is cramped, it is crowding, and it is uniquely claustrophobic throughout the film.
This perspective is once again emphasized when we are witnessing the panicked evasion by the kidnapper - the police have planted chemicals in Gondo’s ransom briefcases that would produce pink smoke when burned. The film, as with nearly every Kurosawa film, is shot in black and white. We have no color to draw our eye, except for one single scene - when the money is burned. Gondo and the police watch from above, in the metaphorical high tower, as a faint pink smoke wafts over the city. The only remnant of Gondo’s hopes and desires, his company, is drifting away in spectacular fashion, for all to see - just as he would have wanted! Every single person, intentional or not, is reminded of the glitz and glamour that the one-percent live with, regardless of if they know this is what they’re being shown. We, of course, are well-equipped with that knowledge in the scene, and Kurosawa’s choice to color this single element is perfect to me. The defining lesson of the film is shown in a way that is stronger than any before it, and not a single word is spoken as the pink smoke drifts across the screen.
Outside of this verticality that Kurosawa uses expertly, he also reinforced that he is the true master of framing. Characters are defined so clearly by how they are filmed - just like Gondo, the film’s antagonist, the intern, is routinely placed delicately in frame to tell one specific message. We don’t see him often, but the few times we do it is always just slightly off-center, obscured by the environment. Shadows cast an obscuring murkiness that makes you squint and bend your head, trying to see who this anonymous villain is. He is being hidden, almost intentionally, by his environment, and this is what Kurosawa wants - the kidnapper is one of the many. The part of society that is not meant to be seen by the outside, the impoverished, segregated, the undesirable part that Japan wanted so desperately to hide.
Dismissive Closure
This, to me, is the standard of the style. Akira Kurosawa did this in every shot of every film that he directed, but High and Low gives, to me, the most captivating societal lessons in a way that is beautiful. We see every aspect of a many-faceted society, both the top and the bottom of 20th century Japan in a way that can not be shown through any other medium. Kurosawa attempted a lot with the film - through the years people have seen it as a commentary on kidnapping laws, a response to the increasing disparity in capitalist economies, and a muddled mosaic of all that was wrong with a nation facing its identity. It is not unheard of for a director to challenge authority through film, in fact it is almost commonplace, but Kurosawa was able to not only eloquently put an entire society into question, but to make individuals question their own role in that dilemma.
My own exploration through the Akira Kurosawa catalog was arduous - watching stories written a half-century ago on the other side of an ocean, told through a filming style that is objectively uninteresting compared to the Hollywood cacophony that is emblematic of 21st century cinema is incredibly hard to connect with. But with High and Low, I bought in. I finally understood the lessons that Kurosawa wanted us to ponder, and the absolutely gorgeous ways in which he shared those lessons. He never forces us to listen to soliloquy, to sit through A-to-Z spelling out of tropes, or ever be locked into a single perspective. Instead, he defined the path for the future of Asian cinema, and told stories in a way accessible to everyone. Through remarkable narrative, paired with intricately placed angles and framing, we see this story from every perspective. We see the Japan of the 1960s as it is - a complicated, unfinished society that needed to bring itself into question in a vulnerable way that was bound to never happen. Kurosawa showed this from on top of the hill, and from in the city. Behind a window, in reflections, and through the rose-tinted eyes of a child. We see the far ends of the spectrum, the distance between, and the parts of society that needed the most examination. Kurosawa, in a way that only he could, gave us a picture of Japan that was necessary, by challenging the condition of a single dichotomy - that between high and low.