‘Black Rain’ By Desson Howe Washington Post Staff Writer April 27, 1990

Director: Shohei Imamura Cast: Yoshiko Tanaka Not rated Compare prices for this movie Find local video stores More movie shopping Save money with NextCard Visa

Shohei Imamura's "Black Rain," which watches the drawn-out suffering and deterioration, over the years, of three hibakusha caught on the edge of Hiroshima on that fateful day, showers you powerfully with a sense of that deathly pall.

The 1988 film, based on Masuji Ibuse's 1969 novel and shot in black and white to convey a sense of the wartime period, is remarkable for -- in most cases -- its understatement and its lack of hysteria. There's a certain dry-eyed pity about its manner. For "Rain's" main characters -- the young, unmarried Yasuko (Yoshiko Tanaka), her uncle Shigematsu (Kazuo Kitamura) and aunt Shigeko (Etsuko Ichihara) -- death has already come, in the form of black, radioactive raindrops that fell on Yasuko's face, as well as the radiation all three suffered when crossing the destroyed city.

As the three await, and eventually come to terms with, their inevitable end, they must also try to live within a society that ostracizes them. For Yasuko, who seeks unsuccessfully to be married, and even carries a medical certificate of good health, that discrimination becomes readily apparent.

The beginning is as powerful as a movie can get. Of course, we all know what's coming on this morning of Aug. 6, 1945, and Imamura uses our disquieting knowledge to advantage, as he sets up shots of people heading to work and going about their lives until 8:14 a.m.

The devastation, the incendiary heat wave (which took approximately 120,000 lives immediately), is shown extremely well for a modestly budgeted film. Imamura has the wisdom to keep the shots tightly framed, so that we get the horror in small scenes of enormous destruction.

But Imamura and art director Hisao Inagaki, in their ornately constructed rubble-strewn tableaux, fall prey to heavy-handedness. Many victims wander aimlessly through the destruction with unintentional smatterings of "Night of the Living Dead," and some of the charred human torsos, seen floating down the river with the lightweight buoyancy of papier-mache, do not serve Imamura's purposes at all.

There are other detracting details, which have a lot to do with the way Japanese films are made -- the occasional exaggeration of performance, for instance; that penchant for scurrying about; the wide-eyed expressions and raised voices. But "Black Rain" is so focused on the greater issue, the living hopelessness of atomic victims, that those reservations seem like pitter-patter.

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