A Fugitive from the Past: Tomu Uchida

Tomu Uchida's A Fugitive from the Past has been celebrated by many Japanese publications as one of the crowning achievements of their nation's cinema. A sprawling 3-hour drama about crime, fate, and karma, A Fugitive from the Past is stylistically dazzling and aesthetically hypnotic. At least for the first two hours. In the last third of the film it collapses into a contrived mess. Allow me to explain. During the first two hours, the audience is treated to a succession of sequences that follow different characters. Each sequence is stylistically distinct. The first part where a trio of robbers elude capture during a ferry accident is full of hasty compositions and frenetic energy. In a sense, the camera becomes a fourth member of their team. Then the film follows a group of policemen who investigate the discovery of the bodies of two of the aforementioned robbers. These sequences feel like an Akira Kurosawa police procedural complete with sparse, hard-boiled shots that quickly propel the narrative through their initial investigation. The next sequence follows the surviving robber as he flees from the authorities and takes shelter with a slightly unhinged prostitute. Fascinating sequences full of non-deigetic sound (such as one where he runs from a temple and the soundtrack contains nothing but the sound of the priestess' chanting), disjointed cinematography, and moments where the film negative flash onscreen are reminiscent of the hypnotizing works of Hiroshi Teshigahara. Then the film flashes forwards ten years. The prostitute seeks out the robber, now a reformed businessman with a new identity, and tries to thank him for giving her enough money all those years ago to leave the sex industry. But the robber rebukes her before killing her and a witness in a moment of panic. The scenes immediately before the double murder seem taken from a Kenji Mizoguchi melodrama, complete with stylistically subdued shots and a strong emphasis on the suffering of women. But the last third of the film where the police track the robber down consists almost entirely of the investigators slowly pondering over every single plot point and story connection in excruciating detail. Because of this, the narrative, which had been so expertly expressed visually for most of the film, becomes a slave of tedious exposition. Whereas the first two hours of the film were expressed subjectively from the point of view of the different characters, the last hour is objective. I can only attribute this stylistic discrepancy to two things: directorial incompetence or an artistic miscalculation. Being familiar with some of Uchida's past work, particularly the wonderful Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji (1955), I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and suspect the latter.

6/10