The Sun.

Gus Van Sant has cited the work of the Russian director Alexander Sokurov as a major influence on his current aesthetic project, and the formal similarities are readily apparent. Since Gerry (2002), Van Sant's films have been organized largely around single take sequences and extended tracking shots, techniques often employed to startling effect by Sokurov throughout his career.

There is also a deeper resonance. Sokurov's films are famously concerned with the notions of distension and duration. Their often punishing long takes represent more than a mere formal strategy: the unbroken, extended shots express the director's preoccupation with the ebb and flow of history. In the art-house hit Russian Ark, Sokurov traverses several centuries' worth of Russian civilization in the space of one remarkably elaborate tracking shot through the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg. This crystalline integration of form and content is also at the heart of Van Sant's recent project--the Olympian detachment of Gerry isolates its characters within a vast physical and temporal expanse, while the distanced camerawork of Elephant (2003) works to suggest the unnavigable gulfs between its teenaged characters.

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This year, both filmmakers produced films meant to conclude established trilogies. Van Sant directed Last Days (2005), a loosely fictionalized account of Kurt Cobain's 1994 suicide that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Van Sant's previous two films, Gerry (2002) and Elephant, were both intended as treatises on death--murder by a friend, and murder by a stranger, respectively--while Last Days focused on the process of taking one's own life. Sokurov's trilogy, meanwhile, is considerably less abstract. In Moloch (1999), Sokurov imagined the private unraveling of Adolf Hitler, and Taurus (2001) is a portrait of Lenin's sad, isolated dotage. The Sun, which also debuted this past spring at Cannes, examines the virtual house arrest of Emperor Hirohito during the US occupation of Japan at the end of the Second World War.

The similarities between these historically and culturally disparate films are striking. Both are set in large, empty mansions and concern individuals weighted down by implications of godliness. The difference of course, is that while Cobain has only posthumously occupied the position of pop-culture saint, Hirohito was literally revered as a God for most of his life by the Japanese population. Accordingly, Van Sant's film feels painfully forced in its feature-length attempt to confer transcendence on a figure unsuited to such lofty intentions. The Sun, meanwhile, works effectively in the opposite direction: it compassionately--and rather audaciously--presents Hirohito as a palpably human being, readily embracing his fall from grace.

The Emperor is played by Issei Ogata, an actor familiar to audiences for his appearance in Edward Yang's Yi Yi (2000). In that film, Ogata essayed a likeable, Bill Gates-like computer magnate, but there's no trace of that easy affability here. His Hirohito is a portrait of strait-jacketed awkwardness. His gestures are stiff, and his chronically trembling lips often struggle to produce words--an amazing metaphor for thoughts left unspoken. Ogata's brilliant performance suggests a kind of institutionalized behavior--he's been neutered by his relentlessly ritualized day-to-day existence. Even as his country crumbles around him, he is attended by servants and generals alike, whose purpose is to isolate their godhead against the fiery realities just beyond his ornately appointed offices.

The opening movements of The Sun feel purposefully dulled. Hirohito is presented as a mostly reactive figure, enduring agonizing strategy sessions with his increasingly apoplectic military advisers. His interest is piqued by his forays into marine biology--chatting up a researcher in his own personal lab about the minutiae of the hermit crab, he seems truly engaged. It is the first indication in the film of Hirohito as a person rather than a carefully attended persona, and thus does the film's major arc emerge: as his country's situation steadily worsens, Hirohito slowly begins to reclaim his humanity.

The slow transformation is presented at a typically Sokurovian remove. The muted colors and hazy, indistinct cinematography undercut intimate identification. It is telling that the most vivid sequence in the film is also the most intensely subjective: Hirohito's fevered hallucination of the chaos beyond his walls. A nightmare CGI vision of fish-bomber hybrids swirling above blazing cities, it seems imported from yet another trilogy: Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. This powerful evocation of Hirohito's frenzied psyche is left purposefully brief. Despite its placement early in the film, it is a climax of sorts--an indication of the man's empathy for his people and horror at the terrible fallout (literal and figurative) of the direction in which his decisions have taken them. For the remainder of the film, the Emperor's interior life will be communicated by external observations, but the memory of this fever dream still lingers.

The remainder of The Sun pits Hirohito in an absurd comedy-of-manners struggle with the US military men who are ostensibly his conquerors but act more like his bemused keepers. The American soldiers, when they appear, are largely indistinguishable from one another, and speak in short, terse sentences--offered the unprecedented opportunity to photograph Hirohito in his garden, they regard him with paternalistic condescension. There is a general, never named, who is meant to represent Douglas MacArthur, but the actor (Robert Dawson) looks nothing like the famous General. Sokurov's refusal to clarify the Americans' identities--or, indeed, exactly when the film is taking place--reinforces the almost halcyon sense of disorientation.

Hirohito's meetings with the MacArthur figure, whose forced politeness belies his obvious impatience in prompting his rival's unequivocal surrender, are supremely uncomfortable. At first, it appears that Hirohito has been cruelly humbled, but slowly, we realize that humbleness is his wont. The American seems to notice it, too, and his tactics become increasingly gentle--the God is being treated with kid gloves. The semantically Byzantine discussions give way to a moment of blindsiding clarity: the general excuses himself from the room and then watches surreptitiously as the Emperor undertakes a self-conscious, surprisingly spry one-man waltz about the room.

There is a dignity and grace to the movements that suggest not so much a man driven out of his mind by the unimaginable stress of his position as the real Hirohito emerging, halting, but increasingly sure-footed, after a period of imposed hibernation. (He looks very much like the graceful narrator of Russian Ark sashaying blithely through the Hermitage.)

The ostensible key moment of Last Days finds its Cobain manque literally elevated to heaven--a bold but pretentious gesture that rings hollow. Hirohito's private dance towards the end of The Sun, meanwhile, is less concrete in its meaning but nevertheless feels powerfully rapturous. Sokurov's aesthetic has always exemplified formal control, but The Sun is ultimately a study in unexpected and rapturous release.

Adam Nayman is a freelance film critic in Toronto. He writes regularly for Eye Weekly, and has published articles in Film Comment, Cinema Scope and Interview magazine.