At the last minute I decided to check out Kurosawa's film Rhapsody in August at the Vancity Theatre last night (Monday), with Douglas Coupland providing some introductory remarks.

It wasn't an obvious choice: Kurosawa's penultimate film wasn't particularly well reviewed when it came out in 1990 ('a child's primer on the evils of war,' according to my trusty Time Out Film Guide), so I was intrigued to hear what Coupland had to say about it.

In fact he only mentioned the movie in passing in his oblique intro - fair enough, Kurosawa was a didactic artist at the best of times and the film speaks for itself - but Coupland left a sour taste in the room when he abruptly wrapped up the post film discussion and called one lady "a fuss-budget" because she had the temerity to criticize it. Rhapsody in August is a simple but resonant fable about three generations of Japanese and their relationship to the war, in particular the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki August 9, 1945. It's a touching, simple film about making peace with the past - not the same thing as forgetting.

The event was dominated by the testimony of an audience member from Nagasaki, who talked much more graphically than the film about the violence of that day (70,000 people died from that one bomb). She also talked about an ancient tree, only a few hundred yards from the epicenter of the blast, in the grounds of a hospital where 800 doctors and patients perished. The tree still survives, she says, and the hospital has been rebuilt around it.

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