High and Low

* This review contains moderate spoilers only in the first paragraph. Read at your own discretion. * The Japanese title of Akira Kurosawa's High and Low, 天国と地獄, translates directly as "Heaven and Hell," and this is perhaps more telling than its official English title, because the idea of hell as a condition of living rather than a destination after death runs through every frame of the film. Near its conclusion, the kidnapper Ginjirō Takeuchi says to Gondō across a pane of glass: "I'm not afraid of death. I don't care if I go to hell. My life has been hell since the day I was born… But if I had to go to heaven, then I'd really start to tremble." It is the most honest line in the film, and perhaps the most damning. Takeuchi wants Gondō to understand what it feels like to lose heaven, and his earlier confession makes the logic of that desire plain: "I do know my room was so cold in winter and so hot in summer I couldn't sleep. Your house looked like heaven, high up there. That's how I began to hate you." The kidnapping is a crime, but it is also a class statement, an act of violent resentment directed upward at a heaven the perpetrator was never permitted to enter. Gondō's mansion sits literally above the city of Yokohama, framed in almost every exterior shot as a palace suspended in the clouds, its large windows looking out over a sprawl of cramped streets and narrow lives below. The city beneath it is shot with an almost documentary attentiveness, its fishermen and street vendors and waste collectors going about lives that exist entirely outside the moral universe of the executive suite above them. The architecture of the film makes the argument on its own, and it is an argument that Peter Singer would recognize. In "The Singer Solution to World Poverty," Singer centers his argument on a man named Bob, who allows a child to die rather than destroy his prized car to stop a runaway train, and argues that most people's everyday spending decisions are structurally identical to Bob's choice, with suffering made invisible by distance rather than proximity. Gondō's mansion is the physical expression of that distance. The city below it is what that distance costs. The central moral dilemma of the film, whether Gondō should sacrifice his life's savings for the kidnapped child of his chauffeur, is one that Kurosawa refuses to resolve cleanly. Of course, to pay the ransom is the morally right option, and the film makes this clear, yet it also insists that calling it the obvious choice -- as the audience is perhaps too quick to do from a safe distance -- requires ignoring the true cost of what is being surrendered. This is where Singer's argument becomes most uncomfortable, because once a person accepts the obligation to help in a case this clear, the logic pushes outward, demanding more and more, until the standard becomes genuinely difficult to meet. Kurosawa, like Singer, embraces this discomfort rather than softening it, and the film asks whether the audience, faced with an equivalent sacrifice in their own lives, would make the same decision. The addict den sequence, arriving late in the film with the sudden visual shock of color bleeding into the monochrome, is the most explicit image of the hell Takeuchi was born into. Kurosawa shoots it with a stillness that refuses to dramatize or sentimentalize what is on screen, the lifelessness of the people inside it doing more than any editorial comment could. This is what the view from Gondō's window has always been looking down at. This is the city that exists beneath the clouds. The sequence reframes everything that preceded it, because it places the moral foundation of the film's central dilemma inside a social context that neither Gondō nor the audience can fully reckon with. Why, Kurosawa seems to ask, should we feel sympathy for a wealthy executive losing his fortune, when losing it would only place him closer to the condition that the people beneath his window have always inhabited? The film begins as a chamber drama, almost theatrical in its staging, the central negotiation confined almost entirely to Gondō's living room, the city visible through the windows behind him like a backdrop to a stage play. It then opens outward into a police procedural, and finally into something closer to a social portrait, each phase expanding the frame of moral responsibility until it encompasses the entire structure that produced both Gondō and Takeuchi. The heaven and hell of the title are the same city, seen from different elevations, and Kurosawa holds that distance open at the end of the film in the glass that separates the two men, in Takeuchi's face looking across at Gondō from the hell he was born into and never left, and in Gondō's reflection looking back -- the whole film's argument visible in the space between them. 93 Story & Pacing: 20/20 Characters & Acting: 17/20 Themes: 47/50 Cinematography & Editing: 5/5 Soundtrack & Sound: 4/5 Memorability: 0/1