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.