Just as the ambitious shareholder of the National Shoemaking Group, Gondo, was preparing to seize the management decision-making power of the entire group by secretly buying shares, this Shakespearean proposition came before him. A stranger called, saying that his son had been kidnapped and asked him to pay a ransom of 30 million yen. He soon found out that the kidnapper had made a mistake and kidnapped his driver's son, but the other party still insisted that he pay the same amount of ransom. If you don’t pay, the kidnapper will kill the child, which means that Gondo chose the latter between a living life and a huge sum of money, which means the loss of his inner humanity; if you pay the ransom—in fact, Gondo doesn’t have any. Ability to pay such a high ransom, because in order to buy the shares of the group, he pledged all of his property, even if he just delayed the embezzlement of the mortgage, it was enough for him to go bankrupt. Choosing between humanity and material wealth is a dilemma here, because the price of maintaining humanity is to give up everything that you have worked for half your life, and you may even go to jail for failing to repay the loan.
People often mention Kurosawa's existentialism. In the movie "Heaven and Hell", the choice Gondo faces is indeed an existential proposition. In Sartre’s philosophy of existence, human freedom is a kind of freedom to say “no” to any authority. The result of this freedom is that people always choose between good and evil, between good and good, whatever. Between the different options that don't care about good and evil, no matter which choice a person makes, he needs to take responsibility for his choice, and human nature is formed in the responsibility after this choice. Sartre's choice is still just a kind of rational behavior. After the choice is accompanied by the rise of human rationality. Kurosawa’s existentialism is more profound than that of Sartre. No matter which choice Gondo makes, it is almost equal to self-destruction: if he does not pay the ransom, it is human nature that is destroyed; paying means that he goes to jail, and it is himself and himself that are destroyed. family. The choice faced by Gondo is as difficult and as deep as the choice Abraham faced between his son Jacob and God. At such a moment, human reason appears very weak, the core of existence is revealed, how fear and tremor will be felt in front of nothingness!
In the first half of the film, the space has been limited to Gondo's apartment on the mountain, and Kurosawa spent an entire hour talking about the difficulty of choice. Gondo kept hesitating and repetitive, and several times decided that he would never pay the ransom, and finally wavered and felt compassionate. Finally, when the choice was made, Akira Kurosawa did not make Gondo a Hollywood-style moral hero, and the film did not bluntly tell the audience Gondo's motives for choosing to pay the ransom. The final choice was almost "silent." After a whole night of thinking, Gondo decided not to pay the ransom. The police officer understood, because "No one has the right to ask you to sacrifice yourself in order to save this child" and asked him next time the gangster calls. Pretend to agree and ask when and where the ransom will be paid so that the police can take further action. Then, we saw that the phone rang, and Gondo, who was taking a refreshing shower in the bathroom upstairs, rushed down to answer the phone; then, as requested by the police officer, he verbally agreed to pay the ransom and asked about the time and place of the transaction. ; Then, we saw that he called the Bank of Tokyo and asked them to send 30 million yen in cash. At this time, we knew that the final choice had been made, and he decided to sacrifice himself. We don't know what his psychological activities are like at this time, maybe he doesn't know it thoroughly. According to my understanding, this shareholder of the shoe factory, who has gone from being an apprentice in a shoe factory at the age of 16 to today, has a deep belief in human nature in his heart, just like his belief that shoes should be made to be suitable and durable. In countries with religious traditions, when faced with such a choice, people can only entrust themselves to faith, like Abraham did. In Japanese culture, only when humanity is regarded as an absolute command that transcends the individual can it be carried out correctly. Choice, and choice at this time only means "compliance."
The second half of the movie is more like a detective movie. After Gondo paid the ransom, the film followed the police officer's process of catching the kidnappers. Every clue was noticed, and everyone who might provide a clue was asked. Kurosawa patiently recorded several scenes where police officers collectively reported that they were tracking the clues separately, detailing each step of the reasoning process. At this time, the audience is just like watching a Hitchcock movie, enjoying the fun of reasoning and suspense. This approach makes "Heaven and Hell" a mixture of several different films: ethics films, social issues films, crime films, and detective films, which is quite similar to the narrative strategy of New Hollywood. We can also put it another way. Kurosawa is using the guise of a detective film to talk about the ethical issues he really cares about. Keeping serious themes hidden under vulgar stories is a common strategy in postmodern art. In my opinion, Kurosawa just wanted to tell the whole story of an incident in a panoramic manner. His films not only have the rich structure of Shakespeare's plays, but also inherit the unique artistic spirit of Shakespeare's plays. In the two films "Chaos" and "Spider's Nest City", which are directly changed from Shakespeare's plays, Kurosawa fully shows how people (couples) who were in a normal state were destroyed due to wrong choices. In "Shadow Warrior", we also saw a similar picture. In "Heaven and Hell", whether it is the difficult choice in the apartment at the beginning or the detailed process of tracing afterwards, they are all part of the overall picture of this event. Kurosawa's film aesthetics is a complete aesthetic. In his view, unless an event is photographed in a panoramic manner, the tragic nature of the event cannot be revealed. In a sense, his film is a rewriting of Bazin's theory of "complete film", not a complete record of objective material reality (because it can only be a "myth"), but a complete record of events.
When I watch Akira Kurosawa's movies, I often think of Lumiere. In "Train Entering", the camera faithfully records the process of the next train entering the station; in "Watering the Gardener", the urchin stepped on the gardener's hose, and the wondering gardener was sprayed by the water from the hose. The first one in the movie Comedy elements. These are the original movies. Half a century later, by the time of Akira Kurosawa, movies have become such a complex and rich art!
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