A subtle biopic of Hiroo Onoda, one of the last Japanese holdouts

FOR YEARS after the end of the second world war, Japanese soldiers hid in the jungles of South-East Asia and the Pacific islands, convinced that the ceasefire was a hoax. In their home country, the soldiers—known as “holdouts”—were hailed as heroes. Yet to many Westerners, such tales have always sounded like a joke, a myth or rare curiosity; in 1981 they were the inspiration for an episode of a British sitcom, “It Ain’t Half Hot Mum”. Now one of the final holdouts, Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, who died in 2014, is the subject of a more nuanced drama. “Onoda: 10,000 Nights In The Jungle”, which had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, is a tremendous survival epic made by a French director, Arthur Harari. It may be the only second-world-war film to cover a span of 30 years, and to finish in 1974.

Early on, flashbacks show the young soldier at his lowest ebb. Barely into his twenties, Onoda (played at this point by Yuya Endo) is racked with shame by his failure to qualify as a pilot. He is then spirited away to a training camp, where the mysterious Major Taniguchi (Issei Ogata) announces that he and his fellow military misfits must fight a “secret war”. They will carry out their own autonomous missions, using their own tactics, with no instructions except to defeat the enemy any way they can and to stay alive at all costs.

The reinvigorated Onoda travels to Japanese-occupied Lubang Island in the Philippines. He hopes to organise a guerrilla campaign against the American forces which are expected to land any day. But after an artillery bombardment, Onoda is left with just a dozen men under his command. The sticky tropical heat and the scarcity of food whittle that number down to three. Onoda isn’t discouraged. Taking to the hills, he keeps his squad moving from caves to bivouacs, stealing food from farmers and burning their crops. As far as he knows, the islanders are in league with the Americans, and it is his duty to dodge and harry them until Japanese reinforcements arrive. And so the years drift by, and death and desertion claim his comrades in arms until he is the last man standing.

“Onoda” is both an intimate study of a few horribly isolated men and a monumental war movie—complete with hectic combat sequences, spectacular wilderness scenery and a three-hour running time. It is amazing that such an increasingly strange narrative hasn’t been the subject of several films already. And yet, rather than paint Onoda as a quixotic madman in the mould of Colonel Kurtz in “Apocalypse Now”, Mr Harari crafts a sensitive portrait of a brave and loyal, if naive, soldier sticking to what he was trained and ordered to do.

Everything is shown from his perspective, with no glimpse of changing fashions and technology elsewhere in the world, so his decisions do not seem entirely ludicrous. Even his atrocities, such as murdering Filipino civilians, are explicable in (as he sees it) a wartime context. Only much later, when the 1950s give way to the 1960s, and the middle-aged Onoda (now played by Kanji Tsuda) is a bearded Robinson Crusoe in a patchwork uniform, does his fanaticism become both tragic and comic. Before that, he gains a home, a makeshift family and a sense of purpose.

The timing may help him seem sympathetic. Thanks to the pandemic, many people have been in their own bubbles for some time and are riddled with anxiety about rejoining the wider world. There are other contemporary resonances, too. When a Japanese search party leaves a radio and a stack of magazines for him to find in the 1960s, there is a sadly funny scene in which he pores over the articles and listens intently to the broadcasts before concluding that they consist of what you would now call “fake news”. Onoda’s story may be mind-boggling, but his desperate clinging to a particular worldview, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, is all too common today.