Movie Black Rain Analysis

Japan In Asia

Black Rain, by Shohei Imamura

Black Rain is a Japanese movie made in 1989, by the movie producer Shohei Imamura, who Is the first (and only) Japanese producer to have won 2 golden palms in the French Cannes Festival. Black Rain is directly inspired from the novel of Ibuse Masuji, a Japanese writer born in Hiroshima. The novel and the book have the same name, and refer to the black rain that fell around Hiroshima soon after the explosion of the first atomic bomb on the 6th of August 1945. The story take place during two different times: during (and minutes/hours after) the Hiroshima bombing, and then 5 years later. Most of the movie takes place in 1950, but jumps in the past are made during the movie, when the character remembers what happened 5 years ago. However the movie starts in 1945 and the bombing of the city.

The first thing I have to say about the movie is how amazed (and disgusted) I was during the first 15 minutes of the movie, in other words during the time when the family crosses the city to go the Uncle’s factory. The pain and the results of the bombing are clearly showed in the movie, not just suggested to the viewer. The burned bodies, babies included, are everywhere. Corpses are floating and lying everywhere, and the misery is in everybody’s face. We can still see (and hear!) the survivors begging for help from people that only want to close their eyes and wish to be everywhere but here. One of the most emotional scene from this beginning is the one between the brothers, as we see that the older brother is disgusted by the person he has in front of him, because of its burns and its flayed flesh. He doesn’t believe that it can be his brother, and question the boy very aggressively. However when he’s sure, he takes care of his wounded bother as if nothing can separate them. I found this scene very interesting, because we see at first that the older brother is disgusted by this burned and heavily wounded boy, but as he realizes it’s his own brother, he changes into the caring old brother he probably always was.

I found these images terrible, barely watchable and terrifying at the same time, but also fascinating as it is one of the first time I see Hiroshima just after the bombing in a movie. The corpses and wounded survivors made me think about the Peace Museum in Hiroshima I visited a few months ago. The only thing I could think about is that I had in front of me the same thing I saw inside the museum, but made into a movie.

The rest of the movie was, I think, very ironic. I have two major points I found interesting because of that. The first one is about the two mains plot, Yasuko’s wedding and the diseases from the radiation. Yasuko’s marriage is very complicated because she can find a groom to marry, as she was touched by the black rain and thus is seen as being contaminated and unhealthy. Even if her uncle does all he can to show she’s not, people still believe in the poison contained in the black rain (and we see later they are actually right to believe so). But the Uncle has trouble to find a groom because of a disease, but when a groom actually is presented to him, he rejects him. And what is interesting is that he rejects him for the exact same reason the other families rejected his niece: a disease. The groom suffers from important Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and hear a tank every time he hears an engine, and wants to destroy it. And it is the reason advanced by the uncle to try to reject the demand, the same reason other people gave him when he proposed his niece, and he didn’t understand the reaction. But he has the exact same one when an ill groom is presented to him.