5/20/23 (Sat)
Shindo Kaneto’s 1995 work proved the final film for two of Japan’s greatest actresses, his wife Otowa Nobuko (who died of liver cancer before the film was even released) and Sugimoto Haruko, who passed away two years later. He was already 82 – he would live to over 100 – so it’s no surprise that he took on the subject of old age and dying. I just wish it had lived up to its co-stars.
3/7/23 (Tues)
I had déjà vu watching Ozu’s 1942 film, one of only two that he directed during the war, and learned that it was initially planned as a companion piece to his similarly themed The Only Son a few years earlier. He had apparently abandoned the follow-up due to unreasonable demands from censors but must have later overcome his qualms; ironically the film was reportedly censored again by US Occupation authorities after the war, so the version today may lack more militaristic parts from the original (which was probably fine with Ozu). It is not a propaganda piece in its current form, with no talk of war other than a brief mention of a physical for the draft, and the “Japanese” values that it promotes are not unique to the war. Like its earlier companion piece, There Was a Father centers on a single parent who makes significant sacrifices for his only son’s sake that result in a painful separation for both when the son is sent away for education and a better life. It is also similar in boasting a strong central performance, here by Ozu stalwart Ryu Chishu.
3/6/23 (Mon)
Ozu’s superior 1933 mini-silent movie was supposedly filmed in just over a week when the director suddenly had time in his schedule; he was apparently filming while the script was still being completed. It sure doesn’t feel like it: though the sets are limited and confined, the characters are fully rounded, and the story says all it needs to say in 45 minutes – padded out, actually, by the odd inclusion of two minutes of an entirely different film by Ernst Lubitsch. (Even weirder, Ozu’s film was initially said to be based on a European novel, which Ozu revealed later to be a total invention. This is an original work written partly by him.)
The film is driven by a tremendous performance by Okada Yoshiko as Chikako, who works as a typist to support her younger brother Ryoichi (Egawa Ureo) in his studies. Continue reading
3/5/23 (Sun)
Fujita Toshiya’s 1973 manga-based exploitation flick is translated as Lady Snowblood, an interesting translation of the original Shura Yukihime or Demigod Lady Snow. (The Japanese title is a takeoff on the fairy tale Shira Yukihime or Snow White. Snow Blood is a pretty lame attempt at preserving the pun.)
3/9/23 (Thurs)
Nomura Yoshitaro’s 1958 film opens with a long and sweaty train trip as two detectives travel from Tokyo to Saga to stake out a certain woman’s home in hopes that her lover, a murder suspect on the run, will visit her at some point. The trip, which takes around ten minutes of screen time, is peripheral to the story, but sets us up for the tedium of their work: they sit on the floor in the crowded train, buy bento and sake in brief station stops along the way, strip to their undershirts, and sweat profusely in the stifling heat. Precisely nothing happens, and that’s the way the director intended it.
That continues when they arrive in Saga, where they find the perfect spying point just across from her house. Continue reading
5/4/23 (Thurs)
The handsome, buff and gay Kosuke has left a poor and closeted life in the countryside and become a successful fashion consultant in Tokyo, complete with fabulous wardrobe, a gorgeous condo and a close gay circle where he plays the sophisticate. We come to realize that he’s also terribly lonely; having lost his mother at a young age, he yearns for the human touch.
**Spoilers ahead**
The 1936 jidaimono Kochiyama Soshun, given the inexplicable English title of Priest of Darkness, is the second of only three surviving films (out of around two dozen) by the prewar director Yamanaka Sadao. While generally considered the weakest of the three, that’s still a pretty high bar; it’s interestingly one of animator Miyazaki Hayao’s all-time favorites.
The film draws loosely from both the Kochiyama and Naojiro plot strands of the Meiji Era (1881) Kabuki play Kumo ni Magou Ueno no Hatsuhana (The First Flowers of Ueno), one of the all-day extravaganzas by the prolific Kawatake Mokuami. Those stories are usually performed these days as separate plays, but Yamanaka brings them together in an ingenious restructuring of the original. (He did a similar impressive overhaul of another Mokuami work in his next and final film, the supreme Humanity and Paper Balloons.)
British director Matthew White doesn’t let the script get in the way of his vision in his Japanese-language version of Pacific Overtures, a co-production between London’s Menier Chocolate Factory and Osaka’s Umeda Arts Theater that debuted in Tokyo a few days ago. He makes his ideas clear in his statement on the show’s website: “At a time when my own country, through Brexit, has opted to isolate itself from its European neighbors, I find it both fascinating and enlightening to investigate a period in recent history when Japan came to the opposite conclusion – that the only sensible option was to engage with the rest of the world to embrace new technologies and to demonstrate that anything the West could do, Japan could do better.”
He doesn’t note that Japan’s decision was forced upon it by the overt threat of military force from the Western powers, resulting in civil war, a wholesale upheaval of society, and the rise of a military regime that led the nation ultimately to disaster. The show’s original ending features a touching twinge of regret for a lost innocence, questioning whether the nation’s choices have been all for the good. The only other Tokyo production of this show some two decades ago, helmed by a Japanese director, enhanced that with a scene alluding to the nation’s unhappy experience in WWII to highlight the high price it has paid for its actions. That’s without mentioning that Japan has managed to engage with the world even with its Westernized ways without compromising its independence. The show seems a strange place to preach the evils of Brexit.
Ozu’s 1936 film was his first talkie, but the sparse dialogue feels almost like an extension of his silent days. Continue reading
One of the prolific Tsuruya Nanboku’s typical madcap stories making its Kabukiza debut. I was mainly interested in seeing Kataoka Nizaemon, a National Living Treasure, in an evil role, where he’s pretty much unequaled on the Kabuki stage.
It’s as impossible to sum up the full story as it was to follow it, with its huge cast of characters, interlocking stories, and numerous twists and turns, not to mention the double-casting of key roles. The Kameyama vendetta is a famous example of the genre (though not one of the Three Great Vendettas as the program claims), and that story lies at the heart of this complex play. Basically, the evil Mizuemon has killed a man in a surprise attack, then poisons the man’s brother in a cowardly trick without fighting the official vendetta honorably. Their adopted brother then vows to avenge their death.
Ozu veers into Mizoguchi territory in this 1948 film in a Waterloo Bridge-type story of a wartime returnee who learns to his shock that his poverty-stricken wife had turned to prostitution. Continue reading
If Sergio Leone had made a yakuza flick, it would probably look a lot like Nomura Takashi’s fine A Colt Is My Passport, including its no-talk-all-action star Shishido Joe in the Clint Eastwood role, the final shootout in a deserted landscape, and Ibe Harumi’s superb Morricone-like score. (The film was released a year after the completion of Leone’s Dollars Trilogy.) It also borrows a moment from Hawks’ Rio Bravo when Joe’s erstwhile companion, played by half-British pop singer Jerry Fujio, is handed a guitar that just happens to be sitting there (“It’s been a while. Sing something”) and croons a ballad. Itami Juzo’s 1980s comedy Tampopo is famous as a takeoff on a spaghetti Western, but this film beat that by two decades, though as homage rather than parody. Others have noted touches of the French New Wave in the detailed way that Joe puts together his weapon for the initial kill and later carefully builds the bomb for the climactic scene.
Still, the creative and confident way these elements are used gives the film a vibe all its own. Continue reading
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