‘The Jesters’ Concludes UCLA Film Series

Subtitles are inadequate to convey the political and historical complexities of Jose Alvaro Morais’ stunningly ambitious but virtually impenetrable “The Jester,” the concluding film in “The Cutting Edge II” series that screens Tuesday at 8 p.m. in UCLA’s Melnitz Theater. Morais’ elegant 10-years-in-the-making film intercuts the rehearsal of a 19th-Century play on the establishment of the Portuguese state in 1125 with its producer’s attempt to finance its production with the sale of a cache of weapons. It is 1978, a time of disillusionment in the wake of the loss of empire in Africa and the 1974 defeat of political radicals. (213) 206-8013, 206-FILM.

The series of Akira Kurosawa’s earliest films continues at the Little Tokyo Cinema 2 this Friday with the week-long engagement of “The Most Beautiful” (1944) and “One Wonderful Sunday” (1947). Teaming one of Kurosawa’s four wartime pictures with his first postwar film creates an ironic impact, for “The Most Beautiful” pays tribute to the extreme sacrifices that were made by ordinary people on the home front, whereas the second concerns the struggle of the same kind of people merely to survive in a corrupt and disillusioned postwar era. It was a time when it seemed, in the words of its beleaguered hero, that “decent people don’t have a chance.”

“The Most Beautiful” is one of the least embarrassing World War II pictures made by anyone on either side of the conflict. Not only does Kurosawa avoid jingoism and racism but he also never once endorses Japan’s aggression. Instead he reveals the utterly selfless dedication of a group of young women, clearly of unsophisticated rural backgrounds, who are working at a lens factory on the outskirts of Tokyo. As the film opens, the factory director (Takashi Shimura, destined to be a Kurosawa regular) announces that the men must double their production whereas the women are to increase their output by half, since lenses are crucial in so much weaponry. Watanabe (Yoko Yaguchi), a group leader, persuades the director that the women can do two-thirds, rather than merely half, of the men’s quota.

The determination and the solidarity with which these young people proceed on their grueling task, suffering frostbite even in grinding the lenses, is genuinely touching. Seen today, “The Most Beautiful” seems a remarkably honest depiction of the toll exacted on the Japanese people by a clearly worsening war. The pretty and talented Yaguchi made only one more film before wedding her director, to whom she was married 40 years before her death in 1985 during the production of “Ran.”

“One Wonderful Sunday” is the first Kurosawa masterpiece and is also the first of several Kurosawa films done in a style virtually identical to that of Vittorio De Sica in his Neo-Realist period. (It has aptly been called his “Miracle in Milan.”) Working with writer Keinosuke Uegusa, Kurosawa has created a film of timeless poetic impact, concentrating on an engaged young couple, Yuzo (Isao Numasaki) and Masako (Chieko Nakakita), who are so impoverished that they are able to meet only on Sundays, when Masako arrives in Tokyo by train. As intimate a film as “One Wonderful Sunday” is, it has the epic scope and visual bravura that was to become typical of Kurosawa.

In the course of the couple’s single day we get a very clear view of what life in postwar Tokyo was like, overridden with black marketeers and signs (some misspelled) in English to attract the business of the forces of Occupation. At every turn--a trip to the zoo being an exception--the couple finds themselves frustrated by being so very nearly broke; propriety, we discover in one long and poignant scene, forbids them the pleasure of premarital sex. In many ways “One Wonderful Sunday” is very venturesome, especially in its use of music, which ranges from a couple of tangos to a banjo rendition of “My Blue Heaven” and Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony.” At a crucial point, Masako addresses the audience, daring to involve us in making the couple’s dreams come true. The series concludes with the two-part “Sanshiro Sugata” (1942-44), which opens Sept. 15. Information: (213) 687-7077.