I’m really grateful to have had the chance to see Kurosawa’s last film, Dreams (1990), at the New York Film Forum. Not only is it an incredible film–certainly one of his best–but it provides, if in a problematic form, a sort of answer to the two questions Kurosawa claims to have struggled with all his life: Why can’t people be happier? and Why can’t they be happier together?

Unique in Kurosawa’s oeuvre (who, although he may have been stylistically innovate, was structurally rather conservative), Dreams is not one narrative but a series of eight vignettes reportedly based on dreams he had himself. It’s difficult to talk about the film without discussing each one, since very little happens; some vignettes have only a few lines of dialogue. If you really don’t want to be spoiled, I encourage you to stop reading now and see the film; but it isn’t so much about the stories as the visuals, and its incredible use of color.

One might think that in his old age, the director had radically changed his style; but this is really vintage Kurosawa. The vignettes hang together remarkably, and echo his age-old themes of human failings and apocalyptic violence. And it begins with a wedding and ends with a funeral.

Above: Sunlight Through The Rain

The first vignette, Sunlight Through The Rain, shows a boy spying on a wedding procession of kitsune, or fox spirits. When he returns home, his mother informs him he is no longer welcome because of this forbidden action, tells him to go beg the fox’s forgiveness, and gives him a dagger to kill himself if need be. It ends abruptly with the boy wandering across a field toward the fox’s home beneath a rainbow.

Above: The Peach Grove

In The Peach Grove, the same child actor meets with the spirits inhabiting a grove of peach trees his family recently cut down. As a reward for his sincerity, they grant him a last glimpse of the grove in bloom. The Blizzard, a take on the story of the Snow Woman, has a party of climbers freezing to death…or do they? The Tunnel–by far, if such a judgement can be made, the best of the lot–has a general confronting the ghosts of his lost men and assuring them they are, in fact, dead. In Crows, an art student steps into the world of Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings, with famous director Martin Scorsese as the artist in what I personally found a somewhat unfortunate turn.

Above: Crows

The final group of vignettes are the most harrowing. In Mt. Fuji in Red, crowds flee in terror from the famous mountain. A man wonders if Fuji, an active volcano, has erupted; but an accident at a nearby nuclear power plant has swamped all Japan with radioactive gas. A few survivors contemplate their last moments. The Weeping Demon portrays the aftermath of perhaps this same holocaust: a lone survivor encounters an Oni who is in fact a mutated human being, who shows him others driven to madness by their cancerous “horns.”

Above: The Tunnel

But in the last vignette, The Village of Waterwheels, an ordinary young man stumbles across a small village where people live by the law of nature. Waterwheels power everything. People live in peace and contentment, without even religion; although a funeral is taking place and everyone, motivated by some primal religious feeling, joins the procession and dances to hauntingly beautiful music, like in a Fellini film. An old man explains to the visitor that they aren’t sad, because the departed woman lived a full life. He reflects: “People talk about the suffering of life. But it’s good to be alive. It’s more interesting that way.”

Above: The Village of Windmills

Now really, I myself keep a dream diary, and actual dreams are just like this. But the thematic connection is clear. Man cuts himself off from nature and his spiritual roots and destroys himself. The violation of the spiritual order in the first vignette sets the tone for the violence and horror of what follows. But perhaps, after all, there is a way for people to live in harmony. I’m not sure if I accept Kurosawa’s conclusion: people can’t simply renounce their own nature and return to Nature; a moral transformation is necessary. But this still remains a touching portrait of Kurosawa’s fondest wish for his fellow men, one redemptive note in the thought of one who suffered so much on our behalf; and the film as a whole is breathtakingly gorgeous.

What a great man. What beautiful stories he told.