Japan film school
1983
color 140 min.
Director: Kon Ichikawa
CLV: $69.95 - available
           2 discs, catalog # CC1347L
Kon Ichikawa, director
of the 1983 version of Junichiro Tanizaki's novel, The Makioka Sisters,
is a master of literary adaptation and the cagiest of great Japanese
moviemakers. You imagine him wearing a hyper-observant poker face as he beaks
down the faŤade of perplexing realities. Ichikawa's empathy and skeptical
intelligence, as well as his graphic and narrative invention, give his best
films a unique scintillation; they reward viewers with both a renewed
appreciation of surfaces and an ironic awareness of depths. He attuned his
first Tanizaki adaptation, The Key (1959), to the allure of flesh and to
the degrading persistence of desire: Ichikawa handled an aging man's sexual
obsession so stylishly that all the characters' erotic dissembling became a
delightful and appalling dumb show. (In a different vein, few movies have
pierced the thin skin of civilization as profoundly as Ichikawa's rendering of
Shohei Ooka's novel about war-time cannibalism, Fires on the Plain, also
from 1959.)The director's early prime came to a close with Tokyo
Olympiad a rich, kinetic account of the 1964 Summer Olympics -- the rare
documentary that celebrates sport for its heightened expressions of humanity
The epic labor of making the film and the controversies surrounding it (for
foreign release, the distributor slashed the running time by half) must have
knocked the wind out of Ichikawa. He began to produce mostly minor work,
including a profitable detective series and a puppet movie starring Topo Gigio,
the Italian mouse who was a regular on The Ed Sullivan Show.
Nearly 20
years after Tokyo Olympiad, Ichikawa fulfilled a long-held dream when he
adapted The Makioka Sisters (which had been filmed twice before).
Retelling Tanizaki's classic family chronicle, he drew on the skills he
acquired in a four-decade career and the understanding of Tanizaki he displayed
in The Key.The result is a magisterial achievement: a barbed, poignant,
and seductive elegy. In the opening-credit sequence, the four heroines --
daughters of a late Osaka shipbuilding tycoon -- tour the cherry blossoms of
1938 Kyoto. It's more than a gorgeous piece of local color. The blossoms
reflect the magnificent Makiokas themselves as they glide through the frame in
luminous kimonos, epitomizing the ideals of feminine refinement and grace that
are fading before Westernization. Ichikawa captures their beautiful
ephemerality, but the movie is also robust and engulfing. The director strove,
he said, "to make the exterior of the film a dazzling, fascinating, and
acrimonious human comedy." He succeeded. You watch in a state of amused
enthrallment, carried along by the satiric humor, bubbly soap opera, and keenly
modulated colors. Then Ichikawa detonates a string of climaxes, and turns the
final third of this two-hour-and twenty-minute movie into an emotional
catherine wheel.
Tsuruko, the oldest sibling, and her banker husband Tatsuo,
the adoptive head of the family, face the same challenge with her sisters that
Sholom Aleichem's Tevye did with his daughters: marrying them off in proper
descending order, according to time-tested matchmaking practices. The next
eldest, Sachiko, is already the wife of a department store clothing-division
manager named Teinosuke. But Yakiko, the most traditional sister, is woefully
obstinate, and the baby sister, Taeko, is rebellious -- she wants to use her
dowry to pursue her art and business: dollmaking. But Tsuruko and Tatsuo won't
release the money until Taeko marries. And Taeko can't get hitched until Yukiko
does.
Every plot turn or flashback amplifies the conflict between
old-fashioned ideas and 20th-century complications. When Taeko tries to elope,
her attempt makes the newspaper -- but with Yukiko's name. The sisters resent
Tatsuo for not buying off the publisher instead of demanding a retraction
(which makes things worse). Tatsuo resents them for holding on to outmoded ways
that diminished their fortunes when their father was alive and now threaten to
curtail his own career. (Juzo Itami, who would go on to direct The
Funeral, Tampopo, and A Taxing Woman, played Tatsuo for
Ichikawa; he forcefully conveys the man's emotional frustration.) Tatsuo and to
some extent Teinosuke, too -- men of the corporate world -- are foreigners in
their homes. What strengthens them is the knowledge that they're the Makiokas'
hope for survival.
Ichikawa's reverence and irreverence complement each other
-- he brings out the sardonic comedy in the marriage interviews ( or
miai). With co-screenwriter Shinya Hidaka, he compresses Tanizaki's text
ruthlessly, rearranging anecdotes, removing a sequence of a deadly flood and
simplifying the novel's network of relationships. He also intensifies
Teinosuke's feelings for his sister-in-law, Yukiko. This superb comic-dramatic
stroke will please all except Tanizaki purists. Yukiko drives Teinosuke crazy
because she embodies everything attractive about nineteenth-century womanhood:
passion and beauty distilled into the promise of domestic bliss. At the end,
Teinosuke still pines for Yukiko after she leaves to get married. His
recollection of Yukiko and her sisters in the cherry blossoms crowns this
lyrical and moving remembrance of Japan past.
-- Michael
Sragow
Credits
Directed by: Kon Ichikawa
Executive Producers:
Tomoyuki Tanaka and Kon Ichikawa
Based on the novel by: Junichiro
Tanizaki
Screenplay by: Kon Ichikawa, Shinya Hidaka
Planning by: Kazuo
Baba
Director of Photography: Kiyoshi Hasegawa
Art Director: Shinubu
Muraki
Sound by: Tetsuya Ohashi
Lighting by: Kojiro Sahashi
Music by:
Akira Ifukube