The Bad Sleep Well

Love is an unpredictable thing and you never know how or when it's going to strike. While yes, somewhere deep down, I know that Seven Samurai has the epic sweep and rousing western-style adventure elements, Ikiru hits that well of heartbreak that lets you know just how precious and fleeting life is, and Yojimbo has the tighter plot, the Kurosawa film that struck the deepest chord in me -- and that I keep returning to time and time again for entertainment and edification -- is this little piece of film noir by way of Shakespeare. It just owned me from the first time I saw it. I was in my early twenties and just starting to realize that I was living in a world that didn't necessarily reward the most honorable behavior. After all, an alternate translation of the film's Japanese title is The Worse You Are, The Better You Sleep.

The film opens with one of the weirdest weddings in history, a roughly 20-minute set piece that introduces every one of the film's major characters and lets you know, via some of the strangest nuptial toasts ever -- at one point, the bride's brother informs the groom "If you make her unhappy, I'll kill you!" -- to fasten your seat belts. You're in for a bumpy ride.

The groom, Koichi Nishi, seems at first to be a corporate go-getter who has married the boss' daughter, in order to rise quickly in the ranks of the Public Corporation her father runs, which has filled its coffers with government jobs received the old fashioned way: bribes and kickbacks, not to mention the blood of certain employees. That is, at least, what most of the guests at the wedding seem to think.

But something else is going on. We realize this when not one, but two wedding cakes arrive, with the second one sculpted in the shape of Public Corporation headquarters with a rose sticking out of a particular window. As it turns out, this is the window from which an employee apparently jumped to his death a few years back and the reaction from one of the executives upon seeing the cake suggests that the death may not have been the suicide the public was led to believe.

Modern American viewers will, no doubt, see shades of the Enron scandal in the film's labyrinthine plot, but Kurosawa was working from more classic sources of inspiration and anyone who is familiar with the storyline of Hamlet is going to be struck with a certain sense of deja vu. I'm going to leave it up to you to see how the film plays out, but I will say that the end of this film filled me with the same sense of outraged horror that I felt when I first saw Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors (coincidentally, somewhere around the same time I saw this film on television).

This isn't an easy film to sit through. As I mentioned earlier, it doesn't have the precise plotting of Yojimbo or some of Kurosawa's more frequently cited masterpieces, but the amazing widescreen compositions -- which are treated with the proper reverence by Criterion's first rate transfer -- will keep your eyes happy and the Machiavellian twists will provide a satisfying meal for your brain. Masaru Sato's percussion-heavy score will keep your ears happy, too.

Criterion doesn't exactly go all-out with the extras. There is a making-of documentary taken from the Toho masterworks series that has graced most of Criterion's Kurosawa titles, but it isn't exactly in-depth. Still, for a film that is considered one of the lesser works in the sensei's filmography, it's a welcome addition. And anyway, to paraphrase the bard, the film's the thing...and this is one bitch of a picture. -- Christopher Hyatt