Eastwood: Letters From Iwo Jima (2006)

Letters From Iwo Jima is Clint Eastwood’s companion piece to Flags Of Our Fathers, and describes the siege and conquest of the island from the Japanese perspective. At one level, that makes for a more linear, straightforward film than Flags Of Our Fathers – the action never leaves the island, apart from a couple of flashbacks, and proceeds more or less chronologically as the battle progresses. However, the half-glimpsed tunnels and bunkers of Flags Of Our Fathers didn’t just suggest another narrative possibility, but a different kind of time, a different kind of waiting – the waiting of a people whose military ethos means that defeat isn’t really an option. As soon as it becomes clear, then, that the Americans are going to win, which is  pretty early in the film, it feels as if the battle’s already over, a distant memory, and the Japanese soldiers are already halfway into the next world, feeling its misty, smoky tendrils starting to encompass their memories and identities, as they pass into a murky fringe that’s not unlike some of the supernatural thresholds to be found in Mizoguchi. It helps that virtually the entire siege is experienced underground, as a series of distant rumbles and tremors, unexpected shafts of light and trails of dust, while Eastwood’s late classicist palette has never been as subdued as it is here – it’s the closest colour could possibly come to black-and-white, bleaching everyone to ghosts, dusting everything on the island with a light layer of volcanic sand. It’s also one of the films where Eastwood’s score feels most integral – a series of skeletal, shivering arpeggios, it sounds like a piano shedding its skin, set free of its earthly shackles for the same sombre destination as the Japanese soldiers. And by the time they finally emerge back to the island, it’s as surreal and otherworldy – or nextworldly – as it is to the Americans, perhaps even more so, since they’ve seen it in its original, pristine condition. While Eastwood doesn’t overplay the shared moments between the two films, it’s clear that some of the most spectacular, CGI vistas in Flags Of Our Fathers were simply nested Japanese POV shots, which drive the drama more directly here. That might seem like a slightly unusual POV for Eastwood, but there’s quite a strong affinity between his clipped, economical style and Japanese military decorum and etiquette, as well as the very sound and diction of Japanese itself. In any case, the extensive recourse to voiceovers and inner monologues – often reciting the letters of the title – prevent it feeling as if Eastwood’s directing in a foreign language, converging English and Japanese into one of the most ambitiously ecumenical war films of the 00s.