Rising Sun. - movie reviews

A much more problematic picture is Rising Sun, made by that pretentious director Phil Kaufman, based on a novel by Michael Crichton (trying for something even spookier than Jurassic Park), and shot by Michael Chapman, an able but often overreaching cameraman. Here the plotting is supercomplicated, the twists more convoluted than those of a python with a bellyache, and artiness is everywhere. Crichton has clearly made a study of Japanese business and social practices that could be turned to good use, but couching it in such sensationalist trappings effectively undermines its efficacy.

A beautiful young woman is discovered dead at the grand party celebrating the opening of the Nakamoto Corporation's new Los Angeles quarters, one of those topless steel-and-glass towers where less is not so much more as way too much. Up in the boardroom, a carpeted flight above the insouciant partying, the body lies on the conference table (a symbol?), with choke marks on the lovely neck - the girl liked to be near-strangled during sex - and enough surveillance devices on the walls for there to be a disk that recorded the murder. But who has the disk? And in a company that manufactures the most up-to-date - indeed future - technology, can one trust the disk, when it finally turns up, not to have been doctored, not to tell a supremely lifelike, hard-to-detect lie?

This is the sort of thing that confronts our pair of detectives, John Connor and Web Smith, and what a strange pair they are! Web (Wesley Snipes) is a black man once embroiled in a bribery case in which Lieutenant Harris, a white racist (Harvey Keitel at his manic best) involved him, and though his own guilt was minimal, it left a cloud over his head. He is a lively fellow, as good at breakdancing as at karate and wisecracking, in which last department, however, he is surpassed by Connor (Sean Connery), an older, mysterious policeman, who is assigned to Web in an unorthodox manner.

Connor, who, as he explains to Web, will be the senpai (senior partner) to Web's kohai (junior partner), with all the ritual appertaining thereunto, is so Japanese in his ways that he may be a double agent. The buddy relationship between the two is indeed more ceremonial and ceremonious than usual, but otherwise the film's only contribution is to make every situation not just double-bottomed, as is customary in this genre, but actually triple- or quadruple-bottomed, usually backed up with elaborate computer (or other) technology, to the point where the human element virtually seeps out of the picture.

Kaufmnan, alas, thinks of himself as an intellectual director, which has propelled him into such pretentiousnesses as poorly remaking Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and ruining such a genuine masterwork as The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Anais Nin, the past mistress of pretension, is responsible for having encouraged young Phil to become a filmmaker, and he repaid the debt by adapting one of her memoirs into Henry and June, a movie that managed the not inconsiderable task of being as repellent as Miss Nin's writings and ego (assuming the two are separate). Here the screenplay is by Kaufman, the equally grandiose Michael Crichton, and Crichton's partner, Michael Backes, who was a consultant to Apple Computers and display graphics supervisor on Jurassic Park. Condignly, Rising Sun looks hke some enormous, insufferably gimmicky graphics display rather than a movie with meaning.

For starters, extreme closeup is used exhaustingly in situations where it

does not belong, along with all kinds of arty-looking blurriness both in the visuals and in the writing, making the film diffuse, obsessive, and hopelessly opaque, as if anything dealing with Japan had to be inscrutable. But Kaufman did accomplish something by engaging Toru Takemitsu to write the background score. Takemitsu is not only a distinguished film composer, but also a world-class serious music writer, whose works are often heard and recorded in the West. Here he has written music of unusual aptness and subtlety, which understands the meaning of background," and is content to remain inconspicuous, almost subliminal, and thereby enhance rather than heavily underline what the visuals are conveying.

One could say that Rising Sun is a movie to be watched with eyes closed, for the music, if it weren't for three people. First, Sean Connery, as polished, urbane, and charming as ever; then two delicious women: the German Tatjana Patitz, opulently voluptuous but unfortunately killed off all too soon; and the Hawaiian Tia Carrere, whose less heady, more elusive sensuality is just as captivating.

COPYRIGHT 1993 National Review, Inc.
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