I am not quite sure how to feel about this: Nikita Mikhalkov of Russia and Chen Kaige of China (who is a US citizen, I believe) have won the the Kurosawa Award for lifetime achievement at the Tokyo Film Festival. The award was worth 100,000 USD, which the two directors split.
My ambivalence stems from my opinion that Chen Kaige has become kind of a hack of late, though he has, on the whole, made many more decent films than shitty ones, and has even made a couple of near brilliant or at least close to seminal films in the last thirty odd years.
Of course, this is a pretty good omen for Chen, who has a highly anticipated upcoming film, the Mei Lanfang biopic. They’ve already released the official MV/theme song for the movie, sung by the film’s two co-stars, Leon Lai and Zhang Ziyi.
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Interesting how his career has paralleled that of Mikhailov’s. Early and unprecedented international success in the late 1980s / early 1990s, capped off with Burnt by the Sun, which in 1995 won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes - the year after Farewell My Concubine won the Golden Palm. Then came Barber of Siberia, which cost $35 million - an ungodly sum in 1990s Russia, and then silence. Now he’s making a sequel to Burnt by the Sun.
I think both are considered directors emeriti now, and these are lifetime achievement awards that more often than not, will be what puts them in the news. This is not to denigrate those achievements - very few filmmakers have that three or four decade peak we associate with, well, Kurosawa. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”