FILM OF THE WEEK: The Makioka Sisters
by Vadim Rizov
Tanizaki's novel takes place from 1936-1941 and includes a big flood sequence; the movie compresses action to the year of 1938, and?presumably deference to budgetary considerations?ditches the flood, confining itself almost entirely to two houses. Exterior shots are brief and fleeting: the outside world recedes, giving each domestic exchange disproportionate influence. The claustrophobia helps to make The Makioka Sisters often funny and/or melodramatic, but it's also an economic horror story a la Austen's Emma, in which marriage is first and foremost an economic necessity, a ticket out of house confines increasingly hard to find as time rolls on. The fact that there's a war going on is in the extreme periphery of the sister's vision, and the film doesn't really care either. There's a passing reference from shifty rich-kid-turned-desperate-blackmailer Okubata (Kobatcho Katsura) about going to Manchuria to start over and occasional background flag-waving soldiers, but the focus is the hothouse atmosphere of four women forced to live together for years, with the outside world forcefully repelled. 
The two eldest sisters, Tsuruko (Keiko Kishi) and Sachiko (Yoshiko Sakuma), are married. Yukiko (Sayuri Yoshinaga) must marry before her younger sister Taeko (Yuko Katewaga) can start courting, but she can't find a single suitable candidate. Group dynamics among four equally flawed sisters can be lurid terrain. Sachiko?the kinder, less status-obsessed of the elder sisters?lets her two unmarried siblings live with her, but the awareness that her otherwise mild-mannered, uncomplaining husband Teinosuke (Koji Ishizaka) lusts for Yukiko drives her, at one point, to maniacally squish and consume a fruit, as overt a camp signal of sexual hysteria as there is. (The maid just gapes.) Tsuruko is aging faster than the other sisters, and her measured speech patterns?a strained, artificial delivery meant to carry on class and breeding traditions?seem like something out of a horror movie next to her relatively informal sisters. Yukiko is nearly silent and seemingly lacks goals or aspirations, while Taeko's quest to start her own career, while understandable, also pushes her to stupid decisions like moving in with bartenders on a moment's whim. Comic relief and moments of sisterly solidarity come during Yukiko's ritualized lunch meetings with prospective husbands: the strangest encounter is with a man whose profession centers around cultivation of the ayu fish. Taking charge, he begins discussing his studies with near-autistic emotional tone-deafness before presenting the death certificates of his first wife and children, just to have everything on the record. Such moments bond the sisters and offer up outside-world perspective. By the end, Tsuruko's lost her monstrous self-righteousness and belief in the family creed, and her sisters all reconcile themselves to living stably as individuals, rather than in relation to each other and the family name. 
It's a long way here from the rising panic of Odd Obsession, whose ending manages to kill more people out of sheer moral disgust than Tanizaki's original. A closer relative is Ichikawa's 1975 I Am a Cat, another history of Japanese social change largely confined to the living room (another adaptation, from Soseki Natsume's novel). A flatter and more ambitious film, Cat shows a professor and his friends sitting around and arguing. The late 19th century background, uneasily acknowledged, is creeping Westernization, which coincides with increasing militarization. Makioka is less ambitious about trying to make sense of all social changes over a large period of time, and better for it. A man behind me at the press screening actually apologized to his companion for taking him to see the movie; taken at surface value, this would indeed be nothing more than a series of melodramatic twists executed with old-fashioned discretion. The staid surface is punctuated by regular jolts of perversity; the tone remains unpredictable rather than dutifully episodic. It's also, at the beginning and end, very '80s in an endearing way. After a tense all-sister lunch, the opening credits put them on parade: the pink light of their carefully controlled interiors matches the blossoming flowers outside, with the blossoming-and-dying metaphor obvious. Their springtime walk takes place to an enjoyably baroque synthesizer; the ending, returning to those blossoms, has big power ballad drums to play us out. Those bookends remind us where the film's coming from: a classical Japanese filmmaker reflecting on a period he lived through (Ichikawa was born in 1915 in the Kansai Region, home to Kyoto and Osaka), pretty much exactly 50 years later, with sardonic affection.
Posted by cphillips at May 4, 2011 1:55 PM
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/greencine/daily/~3/H6DBfgoDkAU/008053.html
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