Movie Reviews : Japanese Tale Shines in ‘Princess of the Moon’

The heroine of Kon Ichikawa’s new film, “Princess of the Moon” (Little Tokyo), is a young girl discovered in a golden cradle in the woods who grows frighteningly fast and has eyes that turn an iridescent, solid blue.

She is a moon child, and later on, all the men are crazy for her: the lords, the potentates and one handsome young minister, whom she loves and sends on a dangerous, dragon-haunted quest. Found in the woods by a frustrated peasant (Toshiro Mifune) and nursed through her rapid life by his wife (Ayako Wakao), the girl, Kaya (Yasuko Sawaguchi), is like many another angel-face: Not long for this earth. The moon shines, the moon beckons her, and not even love can tangle the pull of its beams.

The film is based on a story that is seen as a genuine national literary treasure: a 9th-Century tale that is one of the earliest extant Japanese literary works. Ichikawa approaches it with a mixture of quiet tact and curiously pragmatic showmanship: the film even ends with a rock ‘n’ roll number by Peter Cetera.

This isn’t a flashy film, despite its “Close Encounters” climax. Ichikawa, who has been directing for 40 years, has developed a style as lucid and free from extraneous effect as the later Luis Bunuel or John Ford. With his old friend and colleague Akira Kurosawa, Ichikawa has become one of the cinema’s great living classicists. And its precisely the serenity of “Princess of the Moon” that makes it so effective. When we see the final “Close Encounters” spaceship, it’s designed to look Buddhistic, in Ichikawa’s words, “like a lotus flower blooming upside down.”

You wonder awhile whether the moon girl is some wish-fulfillment dream of the subservient, unassertive Japanese women--here made into a god. Yet, like all legends, this one is capable of different inflections. Part of the film is a corrosive assault on brutal ruling classes and wily, opportunistic aristocrats, and it’s infused with the same qualities--idealism, social iconoclasm, artistry and almost unobtrusive visual beauty--that mark most of Ichikawa’s movies. And, if “Princess of the Moon” (Times-rated: Family) pales beside its American equivalents as a piece of special-effects pyrotechnics, it rises above most of them as a celebration of the power of love, the pull of fantasy and the beauty of innocence and moonlight.