Sightlines · reception

How Charisma was received

1999 · Kiyoshi Kurosawa · Charisma on Sightlines

The arc

Landing between Cure and Pulse, it baffled festival audiences in 1999 as an inscrutable eco-parable about a tree, and for years it was the 'difficult one' in Kurosawa's run; cinephiles have since reclaimed it as a key text of his late-90s hot streak rather than a detour.

What’s debated

The perennial fight is over what the tree actually means — ecological allegory, critique of Japanese society, or deliberately meaningless MacGuffin — with a side debate over whether the ending is a masterstroke or a shrug.

Its footprint

The cryptic instruction 'Restore the rules of the world' is the film's calling card, endlessly quoted in reviews as shorthand for Kurosawa's whole cosmic-deadpan mode.

Where it stands

A cult deep cut for the Cure-and-Pulse faithful — the Kurosawa film you bring up to prove you've gone past the two famous ones.

Did you know? Kurosawa wrote the Charisma screenplay in the early 1990s and it won him a scholarship to the Sundance Institute's workshop in 1992 — but he couldn't get it made until the success of Cure, nearly a decade later.