Dreams | 夢 | Yume | Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (1990)

Synopsis

Following up on his critically acclaimed, blood-splattered epic Ran, master director Akira Kurosawa looks inward with this collection of eight brightly colored dreams.

The first section centers on a young boy (Mitsunori Izaki), who witnesses a forest wedding procession of fox spirits in spite of his mother’s (Mitsuko Baisho) warning.



The second section concerns the same lad who converses with peach-tree spirits after the trees have been cruelly cut down. This is followed by a party of mountain climbers struggling to make it back to base camp in the midst of a terrible blizzard.

The fourth dream deals with a man (Akira Terao) — a Kurosawa stand-in complete with the director’s trademark floppy white hat – who encounters ghosts of Japan’s militaristic past in a forlorn tunnel. In the following dream, the same man ventures into a Van Gogh painting called The Crows and meets the artist himself (Martin Scorsese).

The sixth and seventh dreams venture into nightmare territory — one deals with a nuclear meltdown that threatens Japan while the other concerns post-nuclear mutants. In the final dream, Kurosawa meets a 103-year-old man (played by Ozu regular Chishu Ryu) in a utopian rural village. -- allmovie guide

Cinematography:  Takao Saito

Cast: Akira Terao, Mitsuko Baisho, Toshie Negishi, Martin Scorsese, Mitsunori Izaki, Chishu Ryu, Toshihiko Nakano, Yoshitaka Zushi, Hishashi Igawa, Chôsuke Ikariya, Mieko Harada

Read about this film

Country: Japan | USA
Language: Japanese | French | English
Color: Color (Eastmancolor)
Runtime: 119 min.