Hiding in plain sight behind wartime propaganda, Keisuke Kinoshita, in his second film, finds something like Japanese Chekhov in a story about converting sacred soil into farmland to help feed the troops. Opening on an elaborately produced historical prologue about a great battle from the 1500s, the land now a memorial to the thousands who died there and the acreage controlled by a rudderless family whose chronically ill elder son is unwilling to step up and make decisions. And what a lot of decisions need to be made! A servant’s son proposing to the daughter of the family his parents had worked for. A soldier stationed nearby who tries to buy the family’s most cherished heirloom, a rare samurai sword matching the one he stupidly sold as a young man. A grandmother’s incessant chiming to Buddha and a mother’s fear for a frail son who believes he’s destined for the same early death as his ancestors. Kinoshita perfectly crosscuts between all these modest dramas, then toward the end staging in counterpoint as they all climax at once. With that special use of Japanese architecture, boxy rooms/sliding door panel walls, used like an extra editing device to help keep lines of action clear. Brilliant depth-of-field staging, too. And there’s real Chekhovian acting from the cast, balancing between tragedy, stubborn stupidity, sacrifice, lowdown comedy and quotidian duty. Stanislavski would have kvelled. (Though not at the overly tidy endings achieved by our suddenly recovered neurasthenic scion!) Fascinating and entertaining, if dated by jarring wartime attitudes.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *His fine debut, PORT OF FLOWERS/’43, largely finesses wartime tropes. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/06/hana-saku-minato-port-of-flowers-1943.html
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