Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)

Having found Clint Eastwood's "Flags of our Fathers" a brilliant bit of movie-making last autumn, I felt obliged to see his companion film on the same theme, telling of the battle for Iwo Jima from the Japanese perspective.  Cast with mainly Japanese actors and primarily in that language, one would not have guessed that this was an American production without knowing it upfront.  One would have assumed that in fact it was made by the Japanese and maybe it's a film they should have tackled, although I wonder if they could have presented their relatively recent history with the same detachment.

As I have written many times previously, I physically dislike war movies and I confess that I found this a very hard watch, despite the fact that it was brilliantly filmed in the same washed out colours as the first film and was accompanied by a haunting score.  In addition the lead actors from the general played by Ken Watanabe, now reasonably well-known to Western audiences, through Kazunari Ninomiya playing a simple baker and reluctant conscript who wants nothing more than to survive the war and return to the wife and daughter he has never seen, through Tsuyoshi Ihara playing an aristocratic Olympic equestrian, were uniformly memorable.  However it is hard for the occidental mind to get one's head around the Japanese concepts of honour or to accept the mindset that suicide is preferable to the disgrace of losing, and the scenes of slaughter and self-immolation were upsetting to say the least.  As I said at the outset, I did feel the need to watch this film and on that level alone, I am pleased that I did.  Being a more contained story, it is quite probably the better of the two, but given my druthers, it's the first one that I would choose to see again.