Shohei Imamura's appetite for the ugly, the brutal, the painful, is matched this time by a fully justifying subject — the bombing of Hiroshima and its aftermath.
Black Rain excels in its examination of Japanese society, especially in the post-Atomic age.
Black Rain 1989
黒い雨, Kuroame
Black Rain is the new film by Japan’s great director, Shohei Imamura, who shoots in beautifully textured black and white to tell the story of survivors of the Hiroshima atomic bomb who were contaminated by the fallout.
This is not, however, an anti-nuclear message movie. It is a film about how the survivors of that terrible day internalized their experiences, how they came to see themselves as flawed because they carried the seeds of radiation sickness. Only a Japanese – perhaps only Imamura – could have made a film in which the bomb at Hiroshima is simply the starting point for an unforgiving critique of Japanese society itself.
Imamura’s anger in Black Rain is directed not so much at those who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima as at the way his Japanese characters immediately started behaving as if somehow it has been their own fault.
It must have taken no small amount of courage for Imamura to make this film, which carries an insight many Japanese may not want to heed and many foreigners may not be able to believe.
– Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times