Watches
May 17, 2014
A short and rather strange experiment. It's hard to say what drove Kurosawa to make this film, I'm still not entirely sure what the point of it was exactly, but ultimately I found it to be one of his lesser films. The ending does explain quite a bit, but the road to get there was rather painful and made this film feel much longer than it actually is.
Akiko met Matsunaga in Tokyo, but they lost track of each other. When Akiko hears he might be in Vladivostok she travels there on a whim. She has no other leads so she aimlessly walks around the city until she finally bumps into him. Matsunaga doesn't have any recollection of Akiko, only having gone through all that trouble, she is adamant to find out what happened to him.
The problem with Seventh Code is that it spends way too much time on the wandering part, making it feel like a (relatively poor) traveling blog. The ending is nice and clears up a lot, but it doesn't absolve the 2/3th that came before. The film doesn't feel like core Kurosawa either, so I'm declaring this a failed experiment. The film is not without merit though, so fans of his work should definitely give it a go.