Dreams (aka Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams)

The title is meant literally; the film serves up, in eight vignettes, a series of dreams from different points in the great director’s life — all more or less ecologically minded. Dreams begins with a fantastical encounter between a young boy and a wedding procession of foxes. It concludes with an elegiac sequence featuring Ozu regular Chishu Ryu as a 103-year-old sage. One segment has Martin Scorsese as Vincent Van Gogh. Two others are nightmares of nuclear holocaust — a theme that recalls Kurosawa films past (1955’s I Live in Fear) and future (1991’s Rhapsody in August, his next feature). George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic provided the special effects; Godzilla master Ishiro Honda was a creative consultant. Lucas, Francis Coppola and Steven Spielberg helped Kurosawa raise money for the project (Lucas and Coppola had provided similar assistance with Kagemusha). “Astonishingly beautiful . . . Dreams is absolutely stunning to look at and listen to. It is, in fact, almost as much of a trip as people once thought Fantasia to be” (Vincent Canby, New York Times). Colour, 35mm, in Japanese with English subtitles. 120 mins.