The brilliant actor Issey Ogata plays the Emperor Hirohito just before and after his capitulation to the Americans. It's a Russian film, with dialogue in Japanese and English. I found it very impressive, haunting. The images are sombre and subtle, and Ogata plays Hirohito in a way that made me think of Derek Jacobi's portrayal of the Emperor Claudius, Richard Kapuscinski's book about Haile Selassie (another emperor burdened with divinity) and Dostoyevsky's Prince Myshkin, the "Idiot".
When I got home from seeing "The Sun" there happened by co-incidence to be a BBC documentary on TV dealing with exactly the same events. The documentary said that Hirohito had been complicit with all the aggression of the war, but was whitewashed and rebranded in the space of a few weeks by the Americans, who thought Japan would be much easier to dominate with the emperor still in place. Sokurov's film is much more sympathetic, with the director holding up Hirohito, in an interview with the Moscow Times, as a benign figure:
"
In the end, this is a Russian film. It's very hard to imagine it being shown in Japan. "The Sun" has, for me, a strong feel of the febrile, melancholic intensity of Tarkovsky, and the ambivalence of writers like Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy towards the West, and the modern. There's a scene, for instance, where the emperor is photographed sniffing roses by American GIs who can't believe that this dapper and whimsical little man is Hirohito. They cluster round, calling him Charlie. "Hey, Charlie, looky here! Hey, emperor!" It struck me that Sokurov's film was as sympathetic as it was to Hirohito's doomed otherness because, right now, Russia too has this sense of having lost its menacing, dignified particularity and capitulated to American informality. Russia too knows what it's like to get called "Charlie".