Opiniões dos críticos

Sokurov's concern here is with an antiquated vessel of power, rather than power's amassment or its uses, and the aesthetic of dimness is pervasive. As is often the case in his work, each new location—meticulously designed, decorated, and composed—appears self-contained, a world unto itself in a near-lightless universe.

If Aleksandr Sokurov's THE SUN wasn't so restrained, one could say that it was a staggering masterpiece. But "staggering" implies a grandiosity that is totally alien to the film. Conversely, if one were to say it was a quiet masterpiece, then that would not account fully for the profundity of the film. Of course, it is both staggering and quiet, and this seemingly irreconcilable dichotomy is proved false by the genius of Sokurov.

Using his unique form of cinematic chamber-psychology, Sukoruv has made an incisive look at the difficult question of Japan's leadership responsibility, not through political drama but through a subtle and nuanced evocation of the inner spiritual, moral, and identity confusion of a single human.

Sokurov's obtusely narrow view of Japanese wartime rule has the effect of piling up trivial facts as a way of ignoring big ones, of providing minor curiosities in order to avoid dealing with real questions. When he filmed the extraordinary "Alexandra," in Chechnya, one real squeak of an aging military train, recorded under difficult conditions, conveyed the harsh reality of the situation; there isn't a single real squeak in the nearly two hours of "The Sun.

Working from Yury Arabov's brilliantly distilled and elliptical screenplay, Mr. Sokurov moves in and around the two men, his camera shuttling between the twinned foreign landscapes of MacArthur's gently amused face and Hirohito's implacable mask.

Close-ups give an odd emphasis to feet on stairs or to Hirohito's hand as it's writing, emphasizing the banality of the physical and underlining the oddness of the belief that the emperor is divine, which Hirohito then repudiates. The slow pacing is appropriate to the story of a defeated empire, but the pauses and silences also become spaces in which characters seem to contemplate the strangeness of existence.

Even more than the actions of Hirohito himself, the film's incisive study of the cultural framework that underpins the source of the emperor's absolute power provides a particularly relevant context to Sokurov's expositions on the dynamics of power and (false) idolatry, most notably in the filmmaker's treatment of the mythification of a political leader that seems eerily resonant of contemporary American politics...

A colleague expressed a desire to see Sokurov try his hand at a horror movie; I'd offer that between this film and Moloch (the previous entry in Sokurov's stated tetralogy that also includes Taurus and an upcoming adaptation of Göethe's Faust) the director's made his fair share. Where Moloch's Adolf Hitler was a selfishly larger-than-life figure lost in a labyrinth of lofty aspirations, Hirohito in The Sun is a man trying desperately, though honorably, to avoid an inevitable turn of the tide.