Retrospective: High and Low (Patreon)

"I don't care if I go to Hell. My life has been Hell since the day I was born. But if I had to go to heaven, then I'd really start to tremble."

It feels like a sin to write about High and Low (or Heaven and Hell, a more accurate translation of its Japanese title). I'm leaving the epigraph unattributed in case anyone reading this piece hasn't already seen the movie. Those readers could be actual war criminals and still not deserve to have High and Low spoiled for them.

I can't say that High and Low is Akira Kurosawa's greatest movie, but that's only because I haven't seen Ikiru or Ran. The premise is absolutely perfect; one of those flawless ideas for a movie that comes along once in an epoch. A Japanese businessman (Toshiro Mifune), who has mortgaged everything he owns to stage a hostile takeover of a shoe company, has to immediately pay off his debts, or give his money to the kidnapper of his employee's child, sacrificing his own future. It's conceptually simple yet emotionally torturous. Gondo, who is prone to taking extremely long-term risks and unwilling to risk anything in the short term, has to make a life-or-death decision overnight. All of Mifune's performances were his best, but this one, where he's made to sweat in the confines of his apartment, is truly exceptional.

High and Low predates the paranoid thriller, but ultimately maps out that genre's territory. Its first half is a claustrophobic horror story, where the executive in his ivory tower has to hide from the unseen paupers on the ground below. Kurosawa makes no attempt to downplay the metaphor here — the vicious kidnapper says things like "your room looked like heaven" (a line as soteriological as it is homoerotic).

There's little I can say about High and Low without spoiling it. So go watch this movie. A voice on the phone threatens to undo the upper class. An intern in a hovel sweats out his days without air conditioning. A man's ploy for long-term success is his undoing. The finest shot composition ever seen. Go watch it.