Cinema: Learning to Accept History

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In RHAPSODY IN AUGUST, three generations of a Japanese family contemplate a great and terrible event, the bombing of Nagasaki. But the milieu director Akira Kurosawa creates for their deliberations is small and serene: a farm where a grandmother, who witnessed the blast from afar and lost her husband in it, gently and indirectly informs her grandchildren about the past. And about the proper way to confront it -- with calm, unblinking acceptance. This is a part of their education their parents have neglected. For the middle generation, seeking economic advantage, especially with a branch of the family that has immigrated to the U.S. and prospered, has preferred to deny history's impact on their lives. It is touching to watch a bond being created between wise age and innocent youth and wonderful to experience the grace of Kurosawa's art as he explores, with a new simplicity, one of his preoccupying themes: man's inability to control, or even think coherently about, the mighty historical forces he so often and carelessly unleashes. R.S.