Onoda is a real shocker (review)

Arthur Harari’s film is visible on Arte (and in replay) on the occasion of the theatrical release of Anatomy of a Fall, co-written by the director.

Onoda, 10,000 nights in the jungle is an adventure and survival film, inspired by the true story of a Japanese soldier who refuses to believe that the Pacific War is over. A real shock, discovered at the Cannes 2021 festival (selected in Un Certain regard), which is scheduled at 8:55 p.m. on Arte. And which is already visible in replayfree of charge, on the channel’s website.

First recommend it, just like Anatomy of a fallco-written by its director Arthur Harari and his companion Justine Triet, which stages this drama which received the Palme d’or 2023.

César 2022 – Arthur Harari: “What this environment lacks is courage”

To those who would see French cinema incorrigibly turned towards its little navel, signals sometimes come to open up horizons. In 2016, Arthur Harari signed with Black Diamond a tense thriller in the world of diamond dealers in Antwerp. The filmmaker goes further here. In this case, on a Pacific island in 1944, tracing the thread of an extraordinary adventure, until 1974.

Thirty years in the life of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier stationed in Lubang in the Philippines who refused to accept the end of the Second World War and the surrender of his country. The man enlisted two poor buggers and lived far from the world, waiting for hypothetical orders from his superiors. From the story of these “stragglers” (the Japanese army would have counted nearly 130 of them), Josef von Sternberg had signed the very beautiful Fever on Anatahan in 1952, where a female figure crystallized the passions of desperate soldiers.

Harari’s film, drier and more distanced, watches its anti-hero cling to his own reality, which is also that of the film until the end. Because apart from a first part which advances from airlock to time airlock towards Onoda, the story will gradually shed all narrative ornament to live this abnegation in the present. The precise staging manages to play with the mystery of an unfathomable being but whose stubbornness, however absurd, has everything of a sacrificial quest.

Onoda is a film of survival, of adventures, Japanese also in the purity which it releases. A film by Arthur Harari above all, in which we find this formidable ability to become one with his character.

Nicolas Anthomé: “We have long been certified that Onoda was infeasible”