‘High and Low’ or — Perfectly Crafted?
For the opening 55 minutes of Akira Kurosawa’s ‘High and Low’ (1963) we do almost nothing besides watching a panicking businessman, Kingo Gondo (Toshiro Mifune), grappling with an ethical dilemma and, as he weighs his options, we find ourselves firmly locked in one confined space: the living room of Gondo’s hilltop mansion. All this sounds potentially static and staid yet it is anything but because to keep our attention firmly fixed Kurosawa hits us with some of the most mind-blowingly sophisticated and seriously gripping blocking of actors imaginable, and the result is one of the most wildly ambitious widescreen films ever made… and I’m still recovering from the overwhelming experience.
Gondo’s apartment is all modernist straight lines, uniformly decorated walls and clear uncluttered spaces meaning nothing distracts us from observing the motion, placing and intentions of the actors with each of their individual and collective movements and glances clearly outlining the various relationships, power dynamics and unspoken thought processes at play. It’s a virtuoso masterclass in guiding the viewers attention, instructing us where to look to and how to be acutely aware of the shifting visual and psychological spaces.
But why? Why spend nearly an hour asking us to pay close attention to a small group of characters within a single room? To crank up the tension? That’s certainly a consequence, although I suspect Kurosawa’s also doing something else here, and that’s training us how to look. And it’s a training we’ll be thankful for because as soon as we leave the confines of the Gondo house the film explodes in terms of space, detail, movement and information. So, were you paying attention? Good, because you’re about to have your capacity to do so taken to the extreme.
From here on it’s a lickety-split police procedural involving the handing over of a large sum of money and the subsequent manhunt, and suddenly Kurosawa is bombarding us with location shots, handheld dashes through moving vehicles, the frantic scrutinising of rapidly passing scenery and crowds so dense that picking out a lone individual seems practically impossible (it’s like watching ‘Fritz Lang’s ‘M’ (1931) on a speeding rollercoaster).
Remember how Kurosawa was previously drawing our focus to one man simply walking across a room while some others sat and watched? Well, try doing the same thing now but you’re on the bullet train blasting over a bridge and the person you’re looking for is wearing a hat. Or how about being situated in a packed nightclub attempting to notice the precise moment a drug deal has taken place?
Fortunately, Kurosawa has faith in our training (we’re all little expert investigators now) so can trust us to keep up with his complex arranging of bodies, geometry of areas and locations, triangulation of eyelines etc and we soon realise that this complexity is something to be seen ‘through’ because that fundamental simplicity is still there.
An astonishing example of this is the drug exchange, which boggles the mind in its brilliance. We’re watching two groups of undercover police officers tracking a suspect attempting to buy heroin in a crowded club, a club that’s a chaotic mass of dancing, drinking and erotic flirtation. How the hell are we going to be able to identify what’s going on in all this?!
But notice how we’re dealing with exactly the same system as in Gondo’s living room, only one now churning with excess visual noise we need to ignore and see past. How do we know what’s going on? Exactly the same as before — by the placement of bodies and the direction of their gazes (notice how the suspect, who is “separate” from everyone else, is the only one whose eyes are covered). This is complexity and clarity perfectly combined in one astonishing moment with neither drowning the other out.
Kurosawa then takes it all to the next level, if that was even possible!
Our suspect is wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses, their reflective surface making their lenses appear whited out by the lights surrounding him (you can bet your ass Frank Miller’s ‘Sin City’ owes this film a massive debt), so when he sticks his head up through a bush of flowers, already a beautiful image in and of itself, we see a setting sun sinking below the horizon suspended between the blooms. This one shot, which Kurosawa lingers on long enough for us to drink it all in (he knows exactly how beautiful what he’s pulling off here is so doesn’t deny us our pleasure), left me speechless in terms of its aesthetic impact.
I try not to indulge in hyperbole but ‘High and Low’ might be the most technically remarkable film I’ve seen in my entire fucking life (and I haven’t even mentioned the pink smoke!). Sure, in terms of handling social issues, psychology, wealth and poverty and Japanese society I’ll always prefer Shōhei Imamura’s willingness to embrace the grit of humanity, to dwell firmly in the ‘low’. But that’s not Kurosawa’s style here as he’s obviously more drawn to the rarified high of Gondo’s world, something that’s clearly given away at the start when Gondo is berating his colleagues for their willingness to sacrifice quality over profits, for not respecting the art of the craft of shoemaking.
Kurosawa is just like Gondo with his shoes, and that’s what we’re dealing with here — something that is perfectly crafted.
