'Onoda, 10,000 nights in the jungle': so lonely, so pathetic, so brave

2022-05-06T18:40:37.863Z

French director Arthur Hirari recreates the story of the Japanese soldier who spent three decades on a Philippine island experiencing his own World War II

Jean-Pierre Melville led his irreplaceable films with enigmatic, mystical, fatalistic and memorable phrases.

I remember with lasting tremor the one that accompanied

The Silence of a Man:

“There is no loneliness more terrible than that of the samurai.

Except, perhaps, the tiger in the jungle.

I continually associate it with the harsh and surreal odyssey that the protagonist of Onoda navigates for thirty years

, 10,000 nights in the jungle.

And the story is not born from the imagination of a screenwriter reinventing another Robinson Crusoe.

Obey reality.

That man and his Dantesque adventure existed, as well as becoming legends.

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Onoda, the Japanese soldier who took three decades to surrender

That Japanese military man was called Hiroo Onoda.

He was tormented at first for not having blew himself up as a kamikaze.

He believed to extreme limits in honor, blind compliance with the orders of his superiors, the conviction that the emperor was so sacred that he deserved that you sacrifice your life for him.

Things that are fortunately very rare for most human beings.

This man was indoctrinated in 1944 by his commander to carry out sabotage on an island in the Philippines.

The war will end in 1945. But he will remain in the jungle thirty more years, fighting against peasants and Filipino soldiers, refusing to believe that the war is over, even though his brother even appears to convince him of that pleasant obviousness,

even though a miraculous transistor found in the jungle informs him that the United States has open wars in Korea and Vietnam, even though he hears that man has walked on the moon.

Onoda goes about his business.

At first, in the company of three subordinates.

That they desert his madness or palm it.

And he is more alone than the one for decades, surviving like a cornered beast, with madness around him, without the slightest doubt that he is doing what he swore to do.

This unusual character and his crazy adventure are very well described by the French director Arthur Harari.

Admirably draws the tragicomic side, the moral commitment, the physical and mental resistance to a nature that can become a fierce enemy, the quixotic refusal to admit the obvious, the solidarity, the complicity, the misunderstandings and the fights with the other castaways, the terrifying loneliness, the ordeal of a person unable to surrender and accept reality.

In the midst of so much harshness there are also lyrical, humorous, tender, compassionate moments.

This guy may be a fanatic, but there is also a point of greatness in him.

He faces the disaster with the conviction that he cannot betray his word, his beliefs, his dignity.

There is also visual beauty in the way nature is photographed.

And notably performed by Yûya Endô and Kanji Tsuda, who bring young and old Onoda to life.

And it is appreciated that the director does not resort to the almost always grotesque makeup to describe the passing of the years in the character, those 10,000 bad nights in the dark jungle.

Along with such laudable virtues, the direction of the sensitive Arthur Harari has a problem for me.

And it is that his film lasts three hours.

The editor or the producer should have convinced him that his creature would be more beautiful if some sequences were shortened, that it is not necessary to tell everything in detail, to fall into repetition.