The Sun (or Solntse, 2005) is the third in a series of films by Aleksandr Sokurov, each of which focuses on a 20th century political leader from the darker end of the spectrum: Moloch was about Hitler, Taurus was about Lenin (neither of which I’ve seen), while The Sun is about the Japanese Emperor Hirohito in the days up to and immediately after the country’s capitulation to the US in World War II.

In his production notes on the DVD, Sokurov says that Hirohito is a far more human figure than either Hitler or Lenin, thus making The Sun a more optimistic film than his others about the evils of totalitarianism.

I didn’t read the production notes till after I’d watched the film, but turned to them in the hope of finding out what the film was trying to say. If it is just that Hirohito was a far more human figure than the dictators Hitler and Lenin, then Sokurov’s hardly making much of a point. As the film presents him, Hirohito was a much more human figure simply because he wasn’t really in charge or even connected with what was going on in the war at all. (The Wikipedia article on Hirohito has a brief discussion of the Emperor’s actual involvement). In fact, for a large part of the film, I was wondering if The Sun wasn’t meant as a comedy. Hirohito’s peculiar facial tics and his childlike manner as he distracts himself with dictating notes about the Hermit Crab, and loses himself in a dead end of the war-bunker, made me wonder if there was some mental illness I was supposed to know about. When Hirohito sits down to talk to the incredibly-foreheaded General MacArthur, we get ridiculously inconsequential dialogue which only at one point actually touches on the war — and when it does, it shows Hirohito to be perceptive enough to understand what went wrong, thus raising the question of why he didn’t do anything to stop the war. There’s then a sequence in which Hirohito tries to light a cigar, ending in a peculiar shot of the Emperor lighting the cigar from MacArthur’s. At first it’s as if the two men are kissing, then it’s as if MacArthur was prolonging the event simply to humiliate the Emperor by puffing smoke in his face. But neither of these interpretations has any relevance to the two men’s relationship in later scenes. The film is full of such moments that seem to be saying something, but which don’t build on anything that occurred before, leaving me wondering what it was all leading up to. The Emperor finally animates and starts to talk about his one enthusiasm in life — marine biology — but MacArthur immediately interrupts him to say, bizarrely, he has to leave on an important errand. He goes out of the room and watches Hirohito, who, alone, proceeds to perform a little dance before playfully extinguishing all the candles on the table. MacArthur looks on, smiling as at a child’s antics. Earlier on, US war photographers had called the Emperor “Charlie”, likening him to Charlie Chaplin, underlining this air of childlike innocence.

The only dark moment in the film comes right at the end, when Hirohito has recorded a speech renouncing his divine status. He asks what happened to the engineer present at the recording, and is told the man committed hara-kiri. The Emperor pauses, surprised and upset. Then we get an outside view of a city — perhaps Hiroshima — that is totally devastated and still smoking, a place where thousands have died. It seems to indicate, to me, that an Emperor who can feel the loss of one man he met only briefly obviously didn’t understand the reality of what was happening around him during the war, where such tragedies were occurring every second.

(The film’s best moment is also its funniest, when the Emperor receives a gift from General MacArthur of Hershey bars. Everyone seems slightly awed by the presence of real, cocoa-made chocolate. The Emperor’s butler warns they might be poisoned. The Emperor tells him to try some. The butler nibbles a bit, then says with a shrug, “I prefer rice candy.”)

Pulse (2001, Japan) is the first addition to my Rough Guide to Asian Horror, and it’s a strange one. For the first hour or so, you might think it’s a standard J-horror about a ghostly menace lurking inside The Forbidden Room, a website that causes people to become depressed, then either commit suicide or fade away into nothing but a dark stain on the nearest wall. But as the meandering storyline follows its various characters’ growing awareness of the threat, you start to realise this film isn’t going to resolve itself like your standard horror. The depression-plague spreads and begins to depopulate the world. One character asks what if there was only limited space available for the ghosts of the dead, and what if that space was now full? In an echo of the “Crevices” episode of Dark Tales of Japan, rooms sealed with red tape act as incubators in which ghosts of the dead can re-form and return to our world. It’s their touch that spreads the depression-curse.

Pulse has its share of scary moments, including that Japanese standard, the spook stalking its victim in slow, surreal, jerky steps. In one Birds-like moment, while the camera focuses on one character making a phone call, in the background a young woman casually throws herself off a tower. But in the main, Pulse is not about the sort of scary thrill-fears you expect from Asian horror. It’s a more pervasive, less focused, but far more real, fear of isolation. The graduate student who speculates on there being limited space for the souls of the dead has developed a computer program. The movement of a series of blobs on a screen are controlled by two rules: they cannot get too far apart, and they cannot get too close together. This sums up the film’s rather bleak view of its characters’ attempts to overcome their feelings of isolation in a world where, as one character says, “Words said in friendship with the best of intentions always wind up hurting your friends deeply.”

As a film, Pulse is let down by its opening, creepy J-horror gambits, because they led me to expect something quite different. (The title, of course, doesn’t help. Having watched the film, I still have no idea why it’s called Pulse.) Although marketed in a similar way, this film is less along the lines of Ringu‘s pass-it-on-before-it-gets-you curse or the haunted house scenario of The Grudge and closer, by the end, to something like Day of the Triffids as the horror reaches worldwide-disaster proportions, and a truly bleak feeling at the end which even the most nihilistic of horrors (Audition, for instance) don’t manage. Not entirely successful, but certainly original.

Sophie Scholl is the dramatisation of a true story set in the latter days of World War II Germany. Sophie, her brother, and a few friends, distribute pamphlets criticising Hitler’s government and pleading for the war’s inevitable end to be brought about sooner rather than later, if nothing else for the sake of soldiers’ lives. Unfortunately, in Hitler’s Germany publicising such political beliefs was punishable by death.

Sophie Scholl is typical of a sort of film that Hollywood just can’t do but Europe excells in — slow-paced, intense, the drama of human beings rather than epic spectacle. I wouldn’t be surprised if the film was based on a stage play, as it is mostly static and takes place in a small number of locations, the primary one being the room in which the initial interviews occur between Sophie (Julia Jentsch) and the police officer trying to determine her guilt. That officer is played by a wonderfully Donald Pleasance-looking Gerald Alexander Held, who manages to make the role sympathetic, as he obviously wants to find Sophie innocent, and is a stark contrast to the prosecutor in the later court scene, who dresses in bright, Spanish Inquisition red and screams like a Hitlerian madman.

The film is about the heroism of conscience, of having the bravery to express your beliefs no matter what the consequences. “What can we rely on if not the law?” says the investigating officer. “On your conscience,” Sophie says. The officer replies: “What would happen if everyone separately decided what is right and wrong?” And thus sums up the nightmare of dictators everywhere.

Germany, as a nation, is still labouring under the guilt of having been the birthplace of the greatest evil of the 20th Century. It’s amazing to think that the recent film Downfall was the first German film to represent Hitler (I think I’ve got that right). If so, Sophie Scholl is a timely reminder that many people within that country were horrified by what happened, and tried to prevent it or speak against it despite dangers not faced by those deploring Hitler’s regime from the outside.