Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 01/23/24

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, January 23, 2024

The Munekata Sisters (Yasujiro Ozu, 1950)

Kinuyo Tanaka and Hideko Takamine in The Munekata Sisters

Cast: Kinuyo Tanaka, Hideko Takamine, Ken Uehara, So Yamamura, Sanae Takasugi, Chishu Ryu, Yuji Hori, Tatsuo Saito. Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu, based on a story by Jiro Osaragi. Cinematography: Joji Ohara. Production design: Seiya Kajima. Film editing: Toshiro Goto. Music: Ichiro Saito.

Some very non-Ozu things happen in Yasujiro Ozu's The Munekata Sisters. For example, the camera actually moves in one scene. Granted, it's only a brief pan across the setting at the end of the scene, but it was enough to startle anyone used to Ozu's locked-in low-angle points of view. But more unusually, there is actual physical violence in the film: A man slaps his wife repeatedly, and a few scenes later drops dead on the floor. The most contemplative of filmmakers, Ozu rarely deals directly with violence, preferring to show us the emotional consequences of disturbing events. The man, Ryosuke Mimura (So Yamamura), is unemployed. During his desultory search for a job, he is supported by his wife, Setsuko (Kinyuo Tanaka), who runs a small bar with the help of her much younger sister, Mariko (Hideko Takamine). The two sisters are very different: Setsuko, brought up before the war, is quiet and reserved and dresses in traditional Japanese style. Mariko reflects postwar attitudes in dress and manner: She's outspoken, with a spunky carefree manner, and sharply critical of her brother-in-law, whom she sees as an idler and a drunk. Then an old flame of Setsuko's, Hiroshi Tashiro (Ken Uehara), returns to town. Setsuko might have married him, but he decided to go to France before the war, so she married Mimura instead. Hiroshi is handsome and successful, and Mariko immediately sets her sights on reuniting him with her sister. Ozu develops all four characters with great finesse. Mimura is something of a dead-end case, and his outburst of jealous rage at Mimura's seeing Hiroshi again is frightening, but he has a softer side that he shows with the clowder of cats that he apparently fosters. There is something of the too-detached sophisticate about Mimura that shows in his scenes with Mariko, who falls in love with him while she's trying to reunite him with her sister. As a whole, The Munekata Sisters is more melodramatic than Ozu's films usually are, including the ending, which involves one of those renunciations that movies typically rely on as a plot resolution. But it's beautifully acted, especially by Tanaka and Takamine.