Film: Broken Sun
Release date: 19th November 2010
Certificate: 15
Running time: 92 mins
Director: Brad Haynes
Starring: Shingo Usami, Sam O'Dell, Kentaro Hara, Kuni Hashimoto, Mark Redpath
Genre: Drama/War
Studio: Metrodome
Format: Cinema
Country: Australia
This is an English-language release.
Centring on parallel stories of two survivors of war from opposing sides of the conflict, the chance encounter at the heart of Broken Sun forces its protagonists to acknowledge the profound connection they share as a result of their experiences of war.
Broken Sun’s multiple narrative shifts between its present day setting of New South Wales, Australia, in 1944, and the recollections of war which haunt its two main characters.
Jack is an Australian veteran of the Great War, living in isolation on his farm and plagued by guilt and regret. In a nearby prison camp, Japanese prisoners of war plot their escape. Their leader, Amamoto Shingo, declares death to be more honourable for a Japanese soldier than existence in captivity. Those who doubt the wisdom of his actions are too fearful to stand against him. Amongst them is Tanaka Masaru, a young soldier whose war injuries make him vulnerable.
Following escape from the camp, Masaru’s path crosses that of Jack, and both men come to realise that their experience of war forms a more profound understanding between them than any connection they might have with their own countrymen…
The film constantly switches between the narratives of past and present. Jack has nightmarish recollections of the trenches of the Somme, scenes characterised by a cold blue light and mist drifting across the desolation of no man’s land. His recurring visions of a bloodied soldier berating Jack for his past crimes suggest a dark and guilty secret, which is eventually revealed. By contrast, Masaru remembers sun soaked battles in the jungles of the Pacific, where he endured an inner conflict between his instincts of self-preservation and compassion, and the suicidal code of honour imposed on him by his commanding officer. The way the film jumps between these different narrative threads is potentially distracting, and, in fact, the lack of any revelation resulting from Masaru’s story makes the film’s structure somewhat unsatisfactory, although it does flesh out his character and the contrasting values held by the belligerent Amamoto Shingo.
The film has an oddly pared down quality, which is partly the result of its noticeably low budget and partly down to the spare nature of the script. The escape of the Japanese POWs forming the central action of the film was a historical event, in which some 330 soldiers fought their way out of a prison camp in New South Wales, the majority then taking their own lives rather than submitting to the shame of recapture. The film’s WWI scenes are set at Pozières, the site of the bloodiest battle fought by the Anzacs on the western front. Despite these references to factual events, there is a curious lack of historical detail. The setting of Masaru’s war is merely described as the South West Pacific, so this becomes more representative of a moral and ethical battle, rather than a physical one.
The paucity of detail seems to be a deliberate feature to minimise distraction from the film’s theme of the nature of war and its consequences upon the individual. The intense scenario of the two ex-soldiers confronting each other feels closer to a situation artificially engineered in a play than to the more naturalistic tendencies of film. The trenches scenes were clearly shot on a purpose built set, reinforcing this sense of a wider world condensed to the impressionistic intensity of a stage. This isn’t necessarily a criticism, although Broken Sun swims against the tide of fashion in taking this approach. It feels closer in tone to a literary morality tale such as Of Mice And Men than to the Hollywood sized pyrotechnics of Saving Private Ryan.
Shingo Usami gives a touching performance as Masaru, his limping shuffle conveying childlike vulnerability, and his open mouthed horror at death and destruction reflecting the truth and freshness of a child’s reactions to the horrors of the world. Jai Koutrae is convincingly embittered and tortured as Jack, although he is too young to be believable as a war veteran of thirty years’ standing, raising the question why this character was written as a veteran of the First rather than the Second World War.
The answer seems to be that the filmmakers wanted to show the relentless suffering, year upon year, which this character endures as a consequence of his experiences. He says that “this war keeps me burning, makes me angry. It’s the only thing I have to keep me alive.” His internalised suffering reflects the experiences of thousands of veterans who could not speak of the horrors that they had witnessed to an uncomprehending civilian populace. The unremitting mental torture which Jack undergoes seems to him a just price for the actions which he took during the war, actions which were the inescapable consequence of the inhumane choices he faced. The character of Masaru is, by contrast, a figure of hope, someone who values compassion and humanity, and who would rather choose survival than self-destruction - even at the cost of seeming ignoble.
The film’s Australian setting is a fitting location for the bleakness of its theme, with a harsh sun beating down upon a bone bare, yellow and brown bleached landscape. The best shots are quietly contemplative, as when Masaru, still a prisoner, gazes out of the window at abstract cloud formations, his face lit up by the sun while the rest of him remains huddled in darkness. The still nature of the film and its sparse dialogue create a meditative feel, giving the viewer time and space to reflect on its subject matter. In this, the film’s intentions seem to fall closer to The Thin Red Line than to the war films of Spielberg or Oliver Stone, but the feeling that Broken Sun lacks real substance means that it comes nowhere near matching the success of The Thin Red Line in creating an immersive and claustrophobic impression of the reality of war. Though well intentioned, there is not enough depth to the characterisation to give a convincing sense of understanding the experiences of Jack and Masaru, and how they have been affected by those experiences.
Finely acted, with a standout performance from Shingo Usami, Broken Sun is thoughtfully executed with some memorably touching shots, but it fails to reach deep enough into the hearts of its characters to achieve a satisfactorily powerful meditation on the nature of war and those who endure it. KR
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