An auteur’s reach meets his horrifying ambition – on Kinji Fukasaku’s “Day of Resurrection” (1980)
Astonishing film. I don’t remember how I found out about this, but when I sat down I was expecting a culty B-movie. Instead, this is an insanely ambitious film that just about works.
The film has 4 acts:
a terrifyingly brutal viral pandemic disaster horror
a sociological study of how humanity might deal with the aftermath of a near-extinction event
a cold-war era paranoid nuclear disaster thriller, and
a humanist philosophical exploration of the will to preserve life.
One could make the case that a reasonable 100-minute film could be made up by algebra. By mixing and matching just half (ie 2 out of 4) of those pieces – for instance “1. pandemic disaster + 2. sociology of survivors’ aftermath” “3. nuclear disaster + 4. humanist philosophy” “1. pandemic disaster + 4. humanist philosophy” – and a lesser director might struggle to adequately cover and meld 3 of the 4 into something cohesive.
Incredibly, Fukasaku manages to work through all 4 of them in a single film. Most impressively, it doesn’t feel like he’s under-developing any of them - they are all impactful and thought-provoking, and the film manages a sense of balance that is nearly unbelievable when contrasted with the scope of its ambition.
One could quibble with a few things – Masao Kusakari’s performance suggests that his agent may have cynically oversold his English ability to befit his mixed-race background, a mismatch that the monolingual Fukasaku may have been unable to fully recognise – but there’s nothing here that significantly lessens the film’s impact.
What makes it work is that – through all of the twists and turns – Fukasaku doesn’t pull his punches a millimetre when it comes to depicting the stakes of the horrors that are befalling humanity. At every juncture, he takes the bleakest, most anti-Hollywood choice, sometimes to anticlimactic effect, usually in a manner that eschews the expected narrative tropes:
An infertile, childless woman takes care of a motherless child – the best she can offer him is solidarity in suicide, with a promise that he can meet his mother soon
A group of scientists chances upon the radio frequency of a small boy who has already lost his parents to the virus and has no idea how to get help – they want to console him but he doesn’t know how to operate the radio, and he takes his own life while the crew shouts at him repeatedly to let go of the “push to talk” button
After the first (!) end of the world, the 800-odd sole survivors deal with a 99:1 gender imbalance by rationing reproductive rights in the antarctic base station where they live – our protagonist is in love with one of the women, but he dutifully steps aside when it’s someone else’s turn at the fertility ritual
After a few years, our Japanese scientist protagonist and an American army major make a go of averting the second (!) end of the world, but they are thwarted in their attempt by seconds… after many years of the virus survivors' building a community and repopulating in the antarctic base
Throughout the 4 acts, the film remains resolute in its devotion to depicting both the best and the worst of humanity in the face of larger forces that simply do not care about the effect that they have on us.
Fukasaku’s "Day of Resurrection" (1980) is grim, not for the faint of heart, and any viewer should make sure they are in the right mood to appreciate it, but there’s nothing quite like it. Unforgettable.
5/5 stars.