Maborosi 幻の光 (Maboroshi no hikari) Illusion [1995] • Japan

Continuing my exploration of Hirokazu Koreeda. This is another sad and gentle, lyrical film dealing with the themes of loss, death, and the soul. You have to be in the mood to let a film just float by, or wash over you in lilting waves to appreciate Maborosi. A couple of art house film techniques Koreeda employs might frustrate some viewers. One is the use of extremely long shots, in terms of time to a degree but mostly in terms of distance. His camera doesn't always foreground the focus of a scene but instead pulls back and observes it from afar. Sometimes very far. The second thing is that, with only a few exceptions, you never get a really good look at the faces of the actors, an aspect all the more remarkable given Koreeda's casting a fashion model in her film debut as the main protagonist. There is no vanity in this film. It's all bare naked emotion and gorgeous photography.

The film centers on Yumiko, played by Makiko Esumi the fashion model, whose husband apparently commits suicide by walking into an oncoming train three months after their first child is born. Koreeda establishes quickly, and beautifully, at the beginning of the film a very genuine and loving relationship between the couple so the viewer shares in Yumiko's confusion and pain in not knowing why he would kill himself. After a period of mourning Yumiko agrees to an arranged marriage and moves from Osaka with her son to a small fishing village where her new husband, a widower with a young daughter, has lived all his life. There are a few scenes which suggest Yumiko might have found happiness again but it doesn't last. The haunting inexplicability of her first husband's death is too strong for her to escape. The scene where Yumiko finally and completely breaks downs is framed and captured perfectly, but it's shot from about three hundred yards away.

The whole thing is more like a painting than a narrative film. The camera hardly ever moves. People don't say much and plot isn't really part of the equation. One thing I usually insist on when watching these slow-burn character studies with minimal dialog is access to the character's interior. What are they thinking and feeling? The most expressive entrance to someone's interior is their eyes, but as I've mentioned Koreeda shoots the film in such away we hardly know what the characters look like, let alone are we able to look into their eyes. Something else happens. We may not get a sense of what Yumiko is thinking or feeling but we have great sympathy for her. Her despair and inconsolable suffering are clearly shown.

Maborosi is the work of an artist, not someone with an interest in selling theater tickets. Koreeda's passion is exploring light and color and composition, and in exploring the themes of loss, death, and the nature of the soul. Yes, that's a polite way of saying a lot of people will find the film boring. So be warned. For those who like this kind of thing, and you know who you are, this is one of the good ones. It is so full of magnificently composed photography it will take your breath away.


Maboroshi is a Japanese term for illusion or mirage, and is often used in the tales of fishermen to describe a light that tempts them, without explanation, further out to sea. Maboroshi is the explanation given to Yumiko as to why her husband may have walked into the path of an oncoming train.

★★★★★

Director: Hirokazu Koreeda
Starring: Makiko Esumi, Takashi Naitô, Tadanobu Asano, Gohki Kashiyama, Naomi Watanabe

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Woman of Water (Mizu no onna) [2002] • Japan

A very nice looking indie art house film that seems like it might roll over and play dead at any minute but never does. It also never really gets up and goes anywhere either, which is fine because films that are nice to sit back and look at might as well move along at a leisurely pace. Woman of Water is a bunch of pretentious, metaphorical poetry about man and woman and fire and water fueling a story about a woman who runs a bath house and whose intense emotional states are always accompanied by rain and the arsonist whom she hires to stoke the fires that keep her bath water warm.

The film stars singer UA (pronounced "oowa") in her first movie role and gains a lot of art house credibility by pairing her with Japanese heartthrob Asano Tadanobu. They both get naked a bunch of times so it's a gawker's paradise as far as these things go. Even though UA is playing water her dark sensuality is more earthy than watery and her sex appeal is more ethereal than liquid. Born Kaori Shima, her stage name UA is Swahili for flower or kill. She's not idol-of-the-month beautiful by a long shot, more mysterious and a little worn looking with a well-grounded and tough charisma. She does fine in her acting debut even though her main responsibility lies in being photographed well more than exercising any major thespian chops.

Don't go into this one hoping for any strength of narrative. It's meandering and opaque. Both of the characters have baggage in their past meant to give the film some emotional appeal but it might as well be a silent movie with the freewheeling and oblique way the plot develops, mixing dreams, fantasies, deja vu, and visual metaphors in equal measure. This one is for fans of art house esoterica only.

★★★★

Director: Hidenori Sugimori
Starring: UA, Tadanobu Asano, Hikaru, Yutaka Enatsu, Ryûichi Ôura

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Villon's Wife ヴィヨンの妻 〜桜桃とタンポポ〜 (Viyon no tsuma) [2009] • Japan

This film made me crazy. It's a good film, very well acted with some poetic dialog sprinkled throughout, but it's also some of the worst Orientalist horror imaginable. But that's weird because it's a Japanese film, by a Japanese director, based on a short story by a Japanese writer. "Villon's Wife" is the name of the story the film is based upon, and the film is about a wife but there's nobody named Villon in it. If you run the Japanese sub-title, 〜桜桃とタンポポ〜, through Google translation it returns "Cherry and dandelion", which might seem a little abstract but it has a lot more to do with the movie than "Villon's Wife" and actually takes a bit of the sting out of what comes off as the debatable center of attention and refocuses it on what really matters. 

On the surface this is a film of questionable merit about a long-suffering and loyal wife, named Sachi, to a cheating, thieving, alcoholic husband named Otani. They have a two year old child. Otani is a writer and an attempt is made to give his awful ways a pass by portraying them as self-destructive in that poetic way only artists can be, and be loved. He characterizes the owners of a local pub, where Sachi is working to pay off his debt, as "mercenaries" who feed him liquor so they can profit off him. That's the twisted logic of a drunk. He says things like "Distant yet close, are man and woman", and "Women know neither joy nor grief ... men know only grief. They are always fighting fear". Goodness.

Which brings us to cherries and dandelions. Otani has written a dandelion story about "a dandelion's sincerity". The story moved a young factory worker named Okada so deeply he begins stalking Otani but meets and falls in love with Sachi instead, quickly sussing Otani's ill-treatment of her. Over drinks with this would be suitor to his wife Otani, as a self-reflective woe-is-me justification for his abuse of Sachi, says "I can't even love a dandelion the way I should. I want to pluck its petals, scrunch it in my fist ... stick it in my mouth..." Otani is suspicious of the relationship between his wife and the factory worker and, feeling like a cuckold, meets with one of his lovers, portrayed as equally self-destructive (somehow, as a woman she is able to feel grief too, I guess), and they attempt suicide together. They fail. Sachi dutifully hires a lawyer, an old flame who is still in love with her, to defend Otani who is charged with the attempted murder of the girl. Sachi doesn't have any money and might have slept with the lawyer as payment.

The film ends with Sachi trying to mend things with Otani who is eating cherries that were given to him to give to his son. He acknowledges he is a terrible father. Sachi eats one of the cherries, says they are good and tells her husband that "Being a monster is fine. As long as at least we're alive, it's just fine." I wanted to pull my hair out.

Japanese sexism may not be peculiar but it is certainly intense and complex. On first blush, Villon's Wife seems to be one big stereotype celebrating the loyal, subservient, and beautiful Japanese woman. And props must be given to Takako Matsu who plays Sachi. She is beautiful, beaming that stereotype loud and clear. Everyone in the film is portrayed as loving her. She is so radiant it might be hard to take your eyes off her and see what else is going on in the film. Villon's Wife is a period piece set in the late 1940s and all the characters seem self-destructive. The Japanese have lost the war and GI Joe is everywhere. When Sachi goes to meet with the lawyer who helped her husband, she first approaches a woman on the street who is applying red lipstick to entice GI Joe, and says "Please sell me your lipstick". The woman replies "A Yankee gave it to me. It's American." Sachi makes the woman an offer she can't refuse, applies the lipstick and goes in to see the lawyer. When she comes out, her hair ever so slightly disheveled, she sees the lipstick woman in the back of a Jeep with a few other women and a bunch of GI Joes. The woman is waving and saying "Good bye. Good bye". At first Sachi seems confused, but eventually smiles and returns the "Good bye". She sets the lipstick down in the grass and, with an apparent sense of shame (or empowerment?), wipes her hand across her lips.

I don't really know for sure if this film is that smart and subtle, but if it's not, it's awful. I can't even say for sure what exactly the film is exploring or trying to say. It would help if I were Japanese, I think, and had read the source material but that kind of movie going is for college students. I can say that Villon's Wife presents itself as being a whole lot more than a simple character study of an abused but loyal wife. I blame the chosen English title for throwing me off. All of the performances are outstanding. Takako Matsu is brilliant and beautiful as Sachi. Asano Tadanobu was born to play the role of Otani and Ryoko Hirosue is wonderful in her bit part as his partner in the attempted Love-Suicide. All the characters are good and the film looks great. I'm not so creeped out any more, but be warned: watching this film at face value is a little troubling. If you don't look for deeper meaning it might not appeal.

★★★★

Director: Kichitaro Negishi
Starring: Takako Matsu, Asano Tadanobu, Ryoko Hirosue, Shigeru Muroi, Masatô Ibu
IMDb 7.7 (58 votes)

Cafe Lumiere (Kohi jiko) [2003] • Japan, Taiwan

You have to like trains, find them romantic or aesthetically pleasing in order to enjoy this movie to the fullest: there's a train going by; there she is walking to the train; there she is getting on the train; there she is on the train; there she is getting off the train; there she is walking away from the train ... cut. Rinse and repeat.

Having said that, she, Yo Hitoto, a Japanese singer making her film debut here, is fabulous. I enjoyed her 'hmm', 'hai', 'mmm', 'grunt' style acting. I've never heard acting like it before. She gives a very natural and genuine performance. She's great. Her mom and dad are great. Tadanobu Asano is here. He's a good enough actor that you can sense his muted desire in subtle ways. Almost every minute of people interaction in this film, even in silence, is superb. But the film is padded with a lot of train rides and walking.

I assume we are to live with Hitoto's internals while she is traveling around doing nothing. The problem (or contradiction) with that approach is that we are presented with a character who appears not to have much going on inside, problem-wise. She is overtly presented as someone rather carefree. The spectacular scene where her parents come to visit and she speaks her mind about the man who made her pregnant gave me no sense that it was troubling to her. This seems at odds with the desire of the film. Or else it's genius. I was touched by (what turned out to be) the end of the film, until it turned out to be the end of the film. Hitoto's reaction both times to waking up to Asano's character, the first time when she has the flu and the second time at the end of the film, were lovely as could be. I give Hou high marks for reiterating the theme and for making it obvious the first time and subtle the second but sadly, final time. Waking up to the little joys in life, done without fanfare.

I understand what Hou is trying to do. I really think I get his thing. Well ... a couple things. One is the pace, creating a tempo, a rhythm. The other is creating a scenario with compelling characters that is deep enough to be immersive but not thick enough to proceed and resolve in traditionally expected ways. Basically, we should be left wanting more. We're given the gift of letting our imaginations fill in the blanks. That's a good thing. I just think Hou filled Cafe Lumiere with a little too much un-engaging material, although the Taiwanese director did highlight, very well, many of the family and generational issues that show up as the theme in many of the best Japanese films. The nonchalance of the daughter towards her pregnancy is not an approach her parents share. Nor is her un-romantic, pragmatic view of the man who made her pregnant.

I am suspicious of (these whatever generation) film makers who employ the nothingness technique in the name of realism. I think some of them are jerks who just want to be challenging, some of them are inept and don't realize they aren't succeeding in making something good, and some of them do things that appeal to others but not to me.

I'm not against the technique. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes trains, or at least train tracks, are used very effectively.

★★★★

Director: Hou Hsiao-Hsien
Starring: Yo Hitoto, Tadanobu Asano
IMDb 6.9 (1,171 votes)
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My God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me? (Eri Eri rema sabakutani) (2005) • Japan

This is an extremely slow paced art-house flick punctuated with lots of found object music and noise rock, so depending on your taste in the art of noise you may or may not like it. I was fascinated by much of the found object stuff, especially the vacuum hose contraption built on an umbrella skeleton and attached to a fan motor, but the overdriven guitar wanking didn't thrill me much. I'm sure it was a near nirvana experience for many folks to see Japanese indie icon Tadanobu Asano, his hair blowing Fabio-iously in the breeze, standing on a hillside letting loose on six strings and four giant stacks of loudspeakers in an attempt to cure Aoi Miyazaki of her suicidal tendencies.

The story is a cute apocalyptic one: it's 2015 and a deadly virus is sweeping the population, causing those infected to become extremely depressed and ultimately commit suicide. The atonal music practiced by Asano and his partner appears to be an antidote to the disease. Music can save the world, ya know. A rich old man tries to persuade Asano, whose musical partner had the disease but committed suicide anyway (for dramatic effect), to jam for his infected granddaughter.

The story is told in typical Aoyama fashion: slowly. I never really felt enough of a connection to the characters to enjoy seeing them get into a vehicle and drive along some seaside road for an extended period of time. Nor was I particularly engaged by the scenes of them sitting there thinking for extended periods of time. This kind of direction is meant to give the audience a breather, a moment to relflect on the characters and on their own feelings with regards to what they are experiencing. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. I loved Aoyama's Eureka but this one didn't move me much. Fans of art-house noise rock, or whatever you want to call it, might find something to enjoy here, and fans of art-house films who aren't put off by loud noises might like it too. Just know going in that it's slow and loud.

★★★

Director: Shinji Aoyama
Starring: Tadanobu Asano, Aoi Miyazaki, Mariko Okada, Masaya Nakahara, Yasutaka Tsutsui

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