• 不死鳥 (Phoenix)

6/23/18 (Sat), Tokyo

Kinoshita Keisuke, who helmed the fine Twenty-Four Eyes (二十四の瞳) and Like a Wild Chrysanthemum (野菊の如き君なりき), tends to walk a fine line just this side of sticky sentimentality. In this 1947 work Phoenix, he crosses it. A war widow (the always wonderful Tanaka Kinuyo), now living with her late husband’s family, reminisces about her love affair, brief (two-day) marriage prior to the groom’s return to the war, and loss. Everything that could happen to her does: she loses her mother, father and sickly younger brother in turn, is gruffly rejected by her lover’s father as a potential bride, comes under intense pressure from her uncle and aunt to marry their choice (“If you don’t take him, how else can we build that war factory?”) and so forth. She bounces back in all cases like the phoenix of the title, perhaps a symbol for immediate post-war Japan to pick up and move on.

False sentiment, cloying dialogue, sappy music, sketches rather than characters – this film has it all. Kinoshita doesn’t make up for that with any interesting directorial choices; this is pretty much by the book. I had to laugh when the father-in-law has a melodramatic last-minute change of heart and gives his approval to Tanaka’s marriage to his son in front of her dying brother, complete with a flower he has just picked from the garden. Ugh.

That said, Tanaka and her lover, played by Sada Keiji, do have good rapport and some nice scenes together, especially the charming sequence when they first spot each other on the train. But little else in the film lived up to that level. Not recommended.