Japanese

For his latest film, Yoshida turned once more to melodrama as a means of sensitively engaging a difficult political issue, here the devastating legacy of the Hiroshima bombing. Mariko Okada stars, in her 154th film, as the eldest of three women trying to uncover the hidden family ties that may or may not bind them together. A shared memory of the Hiroshima disaster draws the three generations together in a search back to the very site of the atomic trauma that unites them, with Hiroshima standing in as a figure for the limit point of the national imagination. Among Yoshida’s more classical films, Women in the Mirror is an assuredly stylish late work that carefully balances the three women’s stories as interlocking pieces of a complex psychological and historiographic puzzle.Read More »

Iori, a 16-year-old boy, is forced to commit “seppuku” (ritual suicide) to follow his late sovereign in death and thus preserve the honor of his samurai clan. His older brother’s wife, Oko, who raised Iori as if he were her own son, asks her husband’s permission to spend a night with the young man and teach him, out of maternal mercy, the art of pleasures of the flesh. However, the next day, an official decree is issued, surprising everyone involved.Read More »

Synopsis
At his working place, Kozo and his colleague gangrape the boss’ teenage daughter. Then, on the highway, he picks up a red-haired woman walking on the road back to his home. She ends up staying the night. Later, the woman reveals that she has left her husband and son, but refuses to divulge her name. On the other hand, the boss’ daughter informs Kozo’s colleague that she is pregnant. They decide to elope but, before that, he demands Kozo to let him have sex with the red-haired woman…Read More »

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In a spiritual continuation of the anguished confrontations that close out Minamata: The Victims and Their World, Minamata Revolt captures the direct negotiations that took place between the Chisso corporation and the Minamata disease victims after a court ruling ordered the company to compensate them and their families. Patients who had self-organized to demand the company for direct payments and lifelong medical care stare down and scream in the faces of Chisso’s spokespeople, who effortlessly embody the chillingly staid evil of corporate greed. The second and most rarely screened entry in Tsuchimoto’s Minamata Trilogy, Revolt is a gripping indictment of modern industry and a testament to human resilience.
– Museum of the Moving ImageRead More »

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A Woman’s Uphill Slope follows the fortunes of Akie (Mariko Okada), a young woman who visits Kyoto after inheriting a shop that sells traditional sweets. Fascinated by the shop’s traditions, she abandons her plans to open a tailor shop and decides to stay. She soon falls in love with a married painter, Saburo Yaoi (Keiji Sada), who turns out to be her mother’s former lover.Read More »

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Lost for 70 years until 2022, Shimizu’s second postwar film recalls Mr. Thank You as he frames the narrative in a familiar setting, tracking an autumnal bus ride from a hot spring town through a mountain pass. When the jaunty bus unceremoniously breaks down, a bittersweet sadness overcomes the passengers as unexpected reunions take place, but nothing can be what it was before the war.Read More »

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In 1954, Go Akuzu (Ken Takakura) travels to the Tsuruga Straits that separate Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido from the main island of Honshu, to investigate the tragic loss of a passenger ship in the treacherous waters of the straits. His solution to the marine dangers is to first advocate and then get a green light on building an underground tunnel to handle the inter-island traffic. His devotion to keeping the 25-year project on target leads to a separation from his wife, and a certain amount of loneliness — until he helps Tae Makimura (Sayuri Yoshinaga) get a job at a local restaurant. Read More »

A trio of tales delineating Sex and the Japanese city, “Tokyo Noir” provides more emotional colors than just black and white. Picture marks a collaboration between writer-helmers Naoto Kumazawa and Masato Ishioka that’s less diverse than in “Female,” another recent erotic Nipponese collection, but is still emotionally rewarding, thanks to solid performances and considered pacing. Sexual slant could open up fest slots beyond Asia.Read More »

Criterion’s title for this film is “You Were Like a Wild Chrysanthemum.”

From the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “Films of Keisuke Kinoshita” program notes:

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Masao (Ozu regular Chishu Ryu) returns to his hometown after a successful career in business; the visit prompt memories of the time right before he left to study, when as a young man he fell in love with Tamiko, a beautiful, high-spirited young woman who also loved him but whom he was forbidden to marry as his family—and especially his mother—already had plans for him. Kinoshita brilliantly captures the flush of young love, played out against stunning landscapes—a love made all the more poignant as we know it will remain unrequited. Film scholar Donald Richie called it “one of the most nostalgically beautiful of Kinoshita’s films.”Read More »