A Master at Mixing Comedy, Commentary : Movies: Director Juzo Itami has been thinking about death. The result: 'Daibyonin,' which lashes out against the priority that science has won over human beings in Japan.

By SAM JAMESON

May 31, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

TOKYO — Even before gangsters, outraged by his last movie, attacked him, director Juzo Itami had started thinking about death.

“There won’t be that many more movies I can do,” said Itami, who just turned 60. “There is no possibility of doing dozens more--at most, five or so. Or in that range. The time that is left starts weighing on one’s mind.”

That’s why, he said, he began planning his latest movie a year and a half ago--a comedy about death.

A comedy?

“Well, movies are a business,” observed Itami. “Moviegoers must leave the theater with high spirits. If they leave with dark feelings and depression, they would ask themselves why did I come? I want to make high-spirited movies.”

Mixing comedy with commentary has made Itami--director of such films as “Tampopo,” “A Taxing Woman” and his last film, “Minbo no Onna”--probably Japan’s most popular director, and one of the very few with an international following.

“Minbo no Onna” (“Mob Woman”) struck out so viciously against Japanese mobsters that gangsters retaliated, attacking him last May. Itami, who suffered severe face, neck and hand injuries, pledged from a hospital bed to resist intimidation and to continue speaking out against gangsters and other social ills in Japan.

Five mobsters were arrested last December and went on trial last month on charges of assault. All five pleaded innocent, claiming that police extracted signed confessions from them by force. No verdict has as yet been reached.

Itami doesn’t volunteer comments about the incident.

But between takes on the set of his latest film, “Daibyonin” (“Very Sick Patient”) here, he bent back the fingers on his left hand slightly. He then tried to make a fist. He massaged his wounded, small finger. It barely bent.

It was a rare discomforting moment with the director. Bedecked in a dark brown hat, a red plaid scarf and a gray cape, he paid close attention to details--down to the lighting on an actor’s foot--while he was working. But he still managed to chat, joke and consult with his colleagues. The film will be called “The Last Dance” in the English version.

It opened Saturday in Japan, and will be shown for the first time overseas this fall at movie festivals. The film offers Itami’s special views of Japan and the Japanese.

His script lashes out against the priority that science--in the form of hospitals--has won over human beings in Japan. This is a phenomenon Itami sees as a violation of human rights.

“A hospital is a place to cure people,” he observed. “But what happens when a person who has no hope of a cure goes into a hospital? Even though (the doctor) knows there is no hope for recovery, he will give a patient treatments to extend life--by even one minute, by even one second. The family agrees . . . and the will of the person who is dying is completely ignored,” especially in Japan, where cancer patients usually are not informed of their illness, he said.

“If a patient knew he were dying, he could go home, meet friends and take care of the things he has to do. . . . But when he enters the hospital--his character, his life, his friends--all are taken away. . . . With his existence as a human being ignored, he goes to his death.”

Itami’s concerns don’t end with hospitals. Rather, they encompass faults he sees in the way the Japanese now deal with both life and death. He said he came to realize, only as he was filming his current movie, that “the meaning of death is being lost” in Japan.

Death, he said, used to mark “the entrance to heaven, the thing that gave meaning to life. . . . Now, Japanese have come to regard death as the end to the pursuit of pleasure, when, suddenly, everything becomes meaningless. We try not to look at death, because to look at it, we would lose the meaning in life. . . .”

But, he insisted, death does not have to be “a dark, dirty, repulsive last page of life.” There is nothing wrong with making it “peaceful, filled with gratitude, and bright and sparkling. . . . Facing death, you can raise the level of your character by one step--as the last chance. That’s the message I wanted to offer,” he said.

Many Americans won’t see “Last Dance,” because this film, Itami noted, like his others, probably will be shown only at small-scale art theaters in the United States. “That’s the limit of movies with subtitles,” he said.

Still, as far as Japanese directors are concerned, only Akira Kurosawa, 83, boasts a bigger international reputation. But unlike Kurosawa, who often must borrow money overseas to make his films, Itami has financed his last six movies himself, using as collateral the profits from each of the preceding films.

Itami’s own career included several roles in Hollywood movies, including “55 Days at Peking” and “Lord Jim.” There were also roles in Japanese films, a stint as a television gourmet cook, a TV master of ceremonies and a producer of TV documentaries. But none of those jobs brought him the acclaim he has won since he started writing and directing movies in 1984--at age 51.

Rentaro Mikuni, one of Japan’s leading actors who plays the terminally ill cancer patient in “Last Dance,” said Itami stands out for his social criticism because “he is one of Japan’s very few owner-directors.” Itami’s total control enables him “to take up subjects--like illicit links between businessmen and politicians--that can’t be taken up in Japan,” Mikuni said.

(The female lead in “Last Dance,” as in all Itami movies, is played by Nobuko Miyamoto, Itami’s wife.)

Itami described “The Last Dance” as the most offbeat of all his movies. And although he wrote the last scene “in a rather light fashion,” he said after filming it, he realized it was quite moving.

“I haven’t seen anything like it in movies,” he added.