A look back: Madame Butterfly (Nikikai)

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(While this Japanese-directed production last year had its issues, it had its fans in Tokyo, and I was interested to see how it would fare overseas. Unfortunately its foreign debut in Dresden was cancelled due to the pandemic. I had written the article below for the international run, so I’m reprinting that here.)

The iconoclastic Japanese stage director Amon Miyamoto has a problem with Madame Butterfly. The stereotypical image of a spurned geisha? The sexual exploitation of a 15-year-old girl? A warped Western view of his country?

No, he feels that the opera mistreats the American.

That would be Pinkerton, the US naval lieutenant who purchases Butterfly’s temporary companionship for 100 yen, speaks blithely on their wedding day of one day taking a “real American wife,” leaves Japan almost immediately after marrying and impregnating her, and returns unannounced three years later with a new bride to retrieve his son and take him back to the US. He is typically portrayed as a villain, and it’s not hard to see why – the opera has even been criticized by some as anti-American.

Miyamoto, as usual, takes his own path in a co-production of the Semperoper Dresden, Tokyo Nikikai Opera, Royal Danish Theatre and San Francisco Opera that debuted in Tokyo in October. Continue reading →

A Look Back: Le Placard (The Closet)

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  • Le Placard (The Closet)

5/17/20 (Sun), Tokyo

With bars (and shops and restaurants and theaters and on and on) shut down now by the coronavirus pandemic for far too long, I was worried about a friend who runs a drinking spot in downtown Tokyo. So I suggested hosting a movie night on the big screen in his bar just for his regular customers. He liked the idea and chose this film, figuring that a light comedy would be a safe bet for the trial run. I didn’t recognize the choice at first because of the bland Japanese title メルシィ人生！(“Merci, Life!”), which could apply to hundreds of films. If they couldn’t find an equivalent to The Closet (an exact translation of the French title), surely there was a more interesting alternative out there. Some in the bar speculated that the distributors may not have wanted to emphasize the gay part when the movie debuted in 2001, but this is not, after all, a gay film – the gay angle is played for laughs if anything. I wonder if their obtuseness actually hurt the film’s commercial appeal. In any case, after weeks of watching movies at home, I really enjoyed being with a group of people laughing at the same film. I’m ready to get back to the movie theaters, and I suspect I’m not alone.

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Mishima

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  • Mishima

5/3/20 (Sun)

Paul Schrader’s 1985 film biography is to this day not available in Japan despite being entirely in Japanese and featuring some noted Japanese stars. Mishima is known for his extreme conservative views, but his criticism of Emperor Showa for renouncing his godliness (Mishima felt that this meant that Japanese soldiers went to war for nothing) was a step too far even for his fellow far-rightists, who do not take well to any bad-mouthing of the imperial family. Mishima’s works are one thing, but a story about his life, which must inevitably deal with the circumstances of his self-disembowelment, is politically an untouchable subject – and the right wing in particular can be very unpleasant about these things. Mishima’s widow was also upset by the references to Mishima’s homosexuality, which she was not entirely able to purge from the film. So I was surprised at a friend’s house to find a copy of the DVD that had been purchased in the US, which I promptly borrowed.

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Silence (沈黙) (1971 film)

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  • 沈黙 (Silence) (1971 film)

4/30/20 (Thurs)

Shinoda Masahiro’s film adaptation of 1971, just two years after the novel was published, was supposedly co-written by the novelist Endo Shusaku, but I have to wonder how much he contributed given the way the movie veers from the book in some important respects, especially the ending. It follows the general contour of the story fairly straightforwardly, but gives precedence to the drama over the religious and philosophical themes at the heart of the tale. That makes an interesting contrast with Scorsese’s 2016 remake, which had greater sweep (and clearly a budget to match) and delved more deeply into the priest’s struggle with his beliefs.

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Jesus Christ Superstar Live

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  • Jesus Christ Superstar Live

4/12/20 (Sun)

Andrew Lloyd Webber has opened up his catalog for free streaming over weekends during this irritating coronavirus plague. I missed the previous week’s opening, Joseph…, not realizing that the download expired after the weekend. So I made sure to tune in for the next biblical pop opera, Jesus, by Sunday, which was after all Easter. I’d never seen this in any version and would normally have preferred to wait and see it in a theater. But this was a live unedited film of a 2012 production, so it’s the next best thing. Plus the price was right.

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La Cage Aux Folles (play)

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  • La Cage Aux Folles (play), 3/2/20 (Mon), London

The gay (in every way) French farce La Cage Aux Folles has had a storied history, enjoying success as a French movie (at the time America’s highest grossing foreign-language film ever), a long-running musical since revived on Broadway twice (winning Tony Awards on all three occasions), and an unfortunate hit American film version with Robin Williams. Given its history, it is amazing that the source play has never been performed in English. That has been rectified with this production in a tiny Fringe theater off the beaten path in a spirited translation by the estimable Simon Callow. Since the first film, the show has become more and more preachy and less and less interesting with each incarnation. A particularly cavernous gap exists between the casual French film, which was interested in the gay relationship only for its comic potential, and the American versions, where the gayness was the entire point. I saw the French film in its original release in the 1970s and loved the unashamed treatment of the topic, including the fearlessly “out” portrayal by the leads and Albin’s unexpectedly moving revelation at the dinner, both daring for the time. The politician’s slow burn at Albin’s confession was also masterful. The American versions seem embarrassed by the gay content and go out of their way to make their wokeness known. I’ve always been curious about the source play that started the whole thing, so this was an opportunity I wasn’t going to miss.

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Parasite

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  • Parasite

12/27/19 (Fri)

Did the reviewers see the same movie I did? This Korean film has won rhapsodic praise as a social satire and is being talked about as an Oscar candidate, but it seemed to me an overblown attempt at farce relying on impossible situations and questionable characterizations.

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A Look Back: King Charles III

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The ongoing real-life drama of “Prince Harry: The Prisoner of Markle” brought to mind the character Prince Harry in Mike Bartlett’s fascinating stage show some five years back, “King Charles III“, that speculated on the future of the monarchy after the passing of Queen Elizabeth II. The show’s Harry is portrayed as uncomfortable with his royal role and willing at one point to give it all up, finding comfort in the arms of a fun-loving working-class woman. That notion has proved amazingly prescient in light of current events. I thought at the time that “history might make this [show] un-revivable”, but it now seems to be playing out in real time. This may put paid to the idea that God doesn’t write a good second act. It remains to be seen how this develops (the drama offers a hopeful ending), but I figured it was a good opportunity to look back at this remarkable piece. I wish New York and Tokyo could do political drama this well.

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A Story of Floating Weeds (1934); Floating Weeds (1959)

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  • Floating Weeds (浮草, 1959), 12/1/19 (Sun)
  • A Story of Floating Weeds (浮草物語, 1934), 12/10/19 (Tues)

I was set to see Ozu Yasujiro’s 1934 silent version of this film, so I figured I’d first check out his 1959 remake, which adds not only sound but color. They both proved very fine films, and despite a nearly identical composition and story progression, seeing them side by side was instructive. Continue reading →

Noh: Hanjo, Yugyo Yanagi (班女、遊行柳)

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  • Noh: 班女、遊行柳  (Hanjo, Yugyo Yanagi)

11/17/19 (Sun), Umewaka Noh Theater (Tokyo)

The pamphlet for today’s two shows say that they share an ambiguous ending that is supposed to make us wonder what happens to the characters thereafter. Both are also steeped in references to Chinese poetry, and I noted that they each refer in passing to the ancient Shirakawa Barrier in Fukushima, an oft-used place name in poetry and Noh plays that is associated with autumn.

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The Ball at Anjo House (安城家の舞踏会)

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  • 安城家の舞踏会 (The Ball at Anjo House)

10/27/19 (Sun)

Having recently seen the fun An Osaka Tale, I wanted to check out more of director Yoshimura Kozaburo’s work, and this was an obvious first stop. It is often held to be one of the finest of all Japanese films of the 1940s.

The 1947 film is a Chekhovian portrait of an aristocratic family unwilling to face their decline in postwar society. This is not a traditional Japanese household: it is a formerly titled family living in a palatial Western-style home with a father who studied painting in Paris, a son who plays classical piano and a daughter who (at least in the course of the film) wears only Western clothing. The family appears to have lived in the past mainly off its inherited wealth and property. But times have changed: it survived the war by borrowing money from a slimy businessman who profited in the munitions trade by using the family name, and is now facing collapse in the wake of land reforms, the abolition of the aristocracy and new taxes enforced by the Occupation government (still in power when the movie was made). Continue reading →