Rounding out World War II week at the Mishmash we have the second of Clint Eastwood’s pair of Iwo Jima stories, this time from the Japanese perspective. Although suggested to be “the other side of the story,” the relationship between Letters From Iwo Jima and Flags of Our Fathers is actually slight. This is not an attempt to tell the same story twice, a la Rashômon, but rather to tell two stories that slightly overlap, in the tradition of Krzysztof Kieslowski or more recently Lucas Belvaux’s Trilogy. While the action in Flags begins with the battle of Iwo Jima and follows our American protagonists back to the US, Letters is told entirely on the island — with a few flashbacks — reflecting the reality that most of the Japanese troops never made it off the island.
Despite their differences, Letters is clearly the better film, primarily because it is less susceptible to Eastwood and Paul Haggis’s gravitation toward sentimentality, a tendency which nearly spoiled Flags and which creeps in here as well. Part of the conflict which drives the film is the cultural divide between east and west. It is seen through the eyes of General Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), who studied in and admires America, his friend Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara) an Olympic athlete also fond of the west, and the drafted soldiers who begin to question the value of death for country. And while this may seem blatantly pro-American (and it is), there is an even stronger subtext which questions America’s recent shift toward military imperialism. When two Japanese soldiers come to the realization that the propaganda they have received about Americans may be wrong, one cannot help but hear the same 
conversation occurring right now between American soldiers (or citizens, for that matter) who feel duped by Bush’s claim to be fighting an “axis of evil.”
Like Flags, this film is a technical marvel, with its desaturated photography and meticulous sound design. We spend most of the film in the caves utilized by the Japanese soldiers to mount their attacks, and the sound and camera effects are utterly convincing, as is the portrayal of each soldier’s fears, motivations, bravery and frustration. When Nishi converses with a wounded American soldier and eventually reads the letter he wrote to his mother (which mirrors the letters Kuribayashi and his soldiers have been writing), the emotional weight has been well earned. It is hard to believe, then, that these same filmmakers thought it appropriate to have Nishi quote the mother in his last orders to his troops. In such a fine piece of filmmaking, that type of unrealistic pandering has no place.
Here are this morning’s Oscar-nominated films, alphabetically. The nominees for foreign language film and documentary feature are compiled at the end of the list. (Short format nominees are listed in a 
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