• カルメン故郷に帰る (Carmen Comes Home)

10/11/18 (Fri), Tokyo

Kinoshita Keisuke’s hit film of 1951 was Japan’s first full-length color film, and the director reportedly created the plot around the need to film much of it outside for technical reasons. The joyous set pieces against the mountain landscape remain the best reason to see the movie.

The plot is pretty threadbare: a performer in Tokyo returns to her small mountain village in Nagano after some years, bringing to their bored country lives a bit of glamour and excitement… and scandal, when it becomes clear that, to her father’s great shame, she is little more than a burlesque dancer, i.e., a stripper. The woman, who now calls herself Lily Carmen, feels no shame about her profession, and her insouciance along with her stripper friend effortlessly wins over the village, especially when they offer a show to the delighted crowd in which they undress as colorfully as they dress. She redeems herself in her horrified father’s eyes by leaving the performance fee to the village school and prompting the mayor to return an organ to the blind veteran and composer who originally owned it. She leaves triumphantly atop an open train car, waving to the adoring crowds for whom a burlesque dancer from Tokyo in those pre-television postwar years is stardom incarnate.

The story is cute and offers some solid characters, including Samamoto Takeshi as the embarrassed father, a pre-Ozu Ryu Chishu as the mayor and Sano Shuji as the blind composer. But the film belongs to Takamine Hideko and Kobayashi Akiko, who have good fun with the flirtatious strippers who blithely ignore convention in an open portrayal of independence and sexuality. Some commentators see a message on women’s liberation, but the film is way too light for that. Nor does it comment much on postwar deprivation other than the presence of the veteran, who was blinded in the war. It doesn’t dwell on the strippers themselves, content to show the impact of this sudden injection of city dynamics on the villagers. Not that this changes anything; the film suggests that life will go on pretty much as before after Carmen leaves.

The film has not aged well. It is weakened by the lack of a meaty story, overacting (especially by Ryu) and frequent turns to sentimentality, making it difficult to recommend to a hardened 21st-century crowd. But it has its charms and is great to look at. Kinoshita and Takamine were to go on together to greater heights in 24 Eyes, an incomparably better film.