Blackboard / ブラックボード (1986)

Obscure Japanese Film #17

Takeshi (Terutake Tsuji, centre left) and his minions dish it out.

 

One of two films by the incredibly prolific Kaneto Shindo released in 1986, Blackboard begins with a credit sequence featuring enigmatic images of a young man in sports gear running towards the camera. A jaunty musical theme courtesy of frequent collaborator Hikaru Hayashi suggests we are about to watch a comedy.  Wrong. The opening scene concerns the discovery of the body of a 15-year-old male who has obviously not died of natural causes, suggesting the film is actually going to be a murder mystery. Wrong again. The murder is soon solved – two of the boy’s classmates did it – and, as the story unfolds in flashback, we come to realise that this is actually a work of social realism examining the problem of bullying. 

Takeshi's mother (Nobuko Otowa) says goodbye to her son for what turns out to be the last time. 

 

Although the tone is a little earnest and the script threatens to become didactic at times, Shindo maintains the interest well for the most part, but appears to run out of steam towards the end, ultimately offering no solutions to the all-too-common problem presented and leaving himself with nowhere to go. On the plus side, the scenes of bullying are mostly well-staged and often discomfiting to watch. However, while the headmaster of the school is portrayed as a largely decent man genuinely concerned with the wellbeing of his pupils, his apparent surprise at the existence of the problem seems a bit much after Shindo has spent so much time depicting the school as almost entirely populated by nasty little sadists. 

Nobuko Otowa suffering for her art.

 

Giving his long-time mistress and eventual wife Nobuko Otowa an even less glamorous role than usual, here Shindo casts her as the mother of the murdered boy; she’s a single parent who works as a cleaner, and there’s a detailed sequence of her scrubbing toilets to prove it. At least she has a couple of good dramatic scenes, unlike the great Hisashi Igawa, who has little to do except huff and puff as the Deputy Headmaster, although Shindo favourite Taiji Tonoyama is put to amusing use as a distinguished ornithologist (!) who happened to witness the murder while bird-watching. 

Taiji Tonoyama demonstrates his skill with a telescope.

 

Though less familiar, most of the other actors in the cast give appropriately naturalistic performances, with Terutake Tsuji making a strong film debut as Takeshi, the bully-turned-murder-victim.[1] If the crusading journalist played by Shin Takuma never quite convinces, the fault is in the script not the acting. Overall, I felt that Blackboard is no overlooked masterpiece, but certainly contains enough good work to be worth seeing.

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[1] His subsequent film appearances have been few and most of his work has been on stage and TV.

A Thousand Cranes / 千羽鶴 / Senba zuru (1969)

Obscure Japanese Film #7

 

Originally published in serial form between 1949 and 1951, then as a single volume the following year, Yasunari Kawabata’s novella A Thousand Cranes was first filmed in 1953 by director Kozaburo Yoshimura. According to IMDb, that version was co-written by Kaneto Shindo and Nagisa Oshima, but this seems highly unlikely as Oshima was still at university then, so it’s probable that Shindo was entirely responsible for the adaptation. The 1969 version also credits Shindo with the screenplay, so it could be that director Yasuzo Masumura was working from the same script as Yoshimura. 

The story deals with the complex relationships between the 28-year-old Kikuji and the two former mistresses of his deceased father. Chikako, a teacher of the tea ceremony, has an ugly black birthmark on her breast which Kikuji once saw as a child; it seems to simultaneously repel and fascinate him. She’s an insensitive, interfering busybody who takes it upon herself to arrange an unasked-for marriage match for Kikuji, although it’s by no means certain that she has the young man’s best interests at heart.  Chikako seems never to have recovered from the insult of being dumped by Kikuji’s father in favour of Mrs Ota, a widow, although she nevertheless remained part of his life on platonic terms after the event. Unwisely, Kikuji embarks on an affair with Mrs Ota, who is almost the polar opposite of Chikako: fragile, sentimental and over-emotional. 

Like Koji Takahashi in Two Wives, Mikijiro Hira (as Kikuji) has the difficult task of playing the stolid male lead between two much bigger female stars. Machiko Kyo gives the best performance as the scheming, impervious-to-insult Chikako, and one can see the schadenfreude written all over her face when tragedy strikes. Ayako Wakao has the lesser part as Mrs Ota, a rather one-note character usually seen either in tears or on the verge of fainting. One interesting difference from the book is that Mrs Ota is portrayed as being less sincere and more manipulative in the film – on two occasions, she appears to surreptitiously check that her tears are having the desired effect on Kikuji. Both women are well-cast, although the then 35-year-old Wakao is ten years younger than the character described in the book and looks it. A Thousand Cranes was the last of 20 films directed by Masumura in which she starred. Apparently, in a 1970 interview, he described her as ‘selfish and calculating’, going on to say that ‘she’s hardly a pure-hearted woman and she knows it,’ [1] so it certainly appears that the two fell out and one wonders whether Masumura’s view of her coloured the portrayal of Mrs Ota in the movie. 

 

I have to admit to having found the Kawabata novella entirely unengaging and Masumura’s film did little to improve matters for me. Although certainly very faithful to the literary original, this unfortunately translates as a series of scenes of people talking in rooms, which seldom makes for exciting cinema. No doubt this meant that only a small budget was required – something which may have been a consideration as the studio responsible (Daiei) was struggling at this point and would go bankrupt two years later. Wakao is good as ever, but A Thousand Cranes is unlikely to satisfy her fans as she has the lesser of the two main female roles and disappears less than an hour into the film.

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[1] Quoted by ‘manfromplanetx’ in his review of The Graceful Brute (1962) on IMDb. Unfortunately, I don’t know the original source.

Two Wives / 妻二人 / Tsuma futari (1967)

Obscure Japanese Film #5

In the 16^th of their 20 films together, Yasuzo Masumura directs star Ayako Wakao in a contemporary romantic crime drama closely based on a 1955 novel by Patrick Quentin entitled The Man with Two Wives.[1]  The screenplay is by the prolific Kaneto Shindo, best-known in the West as the writer-director of Onibaba (1964). Apart from the Japanese setting, the main difference between the book and the film is that the former is a whodunit, whereas in the film the identity of the guilty party is never a mystery. Although Wakao is excellent as always, in truth she is somewhat miscast as the character she plays is supposed to be dowdy and Wakao, of course, is the antithesis of that particular quality.

The film opens with Kenzo (Koji Takahashi) running into his old flame Junko (Mariko Okada) one night and finding her down on her luck and shacked up with the sleazy Kobayashi (Takao Ito), who beats her up whenever he gets drunk. Junko was the only person who believed in Kenzo when he was a struggling young writer, but when he abandoned his literary aspirations and went to work for a magazine (Housewife’s World), he caught the interest of the boss’s daughter, Michiko (Wakao), married her, and so abandoned Junko as well. Nevertheless, he still has feelings for Junko.

Michiko is a philanthropist who has set up a fund for disabled children, but she tends to irritate others, especially her rebellious sister, Rie (Kyoko Enami), who sees her as a meddling, self-righteous do-gooder. For her part, Junko clearly never got over Kenzo, and was only attracted to Kobayashi as he, too, is a struggling young writer. At her suggestion, Kobayashi submits a manuscript to Housewife’s World through Kenzo; although it’s rejected, he manages to get himself introduced to Rie and begins plotting to marry her for her money and abandon Junko, just as Kenzo had done (albeit out of weakness rather than cold calculation). However, Michiko sees through Kobayashi and takes matters into her own hands, but her actions unwittingly lead to blackmail, murder and a complicated web of lies which eventually expose corruption among those close to her and give the lie to the magazine’s tagline: ‘Clean! Bright! Beautiful!’

I found the male lead, Koji Takahashi, a little wooden, but he may well have been instructed to play the role in stoic fashion and keep it low key. He seems to have been a TV star who never really made it in the movies and in any case I suspect that Masumura wasn’t too concerned with having a strong male actor in the role – as the title suggests, this film is more about the women. Wakao’s co-star, Mariko Okada, is another fine actress of equal stature who had appeared in the films of Ozu, Naruse and Kinoshita; she later married the director Yoshishige Yoshida, for whom she made many films. Okada also played Oida to Tatsuya Nakadai’s Iemon in Illusion of Blood (1965) and later gave a fine comic performance opposite Nakadai in I Am a Cat (1975). Unfortunately, the nature of the plot means that Wakao and Okada have only two fairly brief and rather tame scenes together towards the end. Overall, despite her miscasting, Wakao makes it work and there’s never a false note in her performance. The same can be said of Okada, who seems more suitably cast as the unfailingly sweet-natured Junko.[2] Kyoko Enami, best-known as the star of the Woman Gambler film series, is also good value as Michiko’s bad-girl sister.  

The film benefits from Masumura’s typically no-nonsense direction and tight editing, clocking in at around 90 minutes as virtually all of his films do. The widescreen cinematography and muted colour scheme, while not exceptional, look good throughout, and there’s a classy string quartet score by Tadashi Yamauchi. In the latter stages, the plot becomes increasingly complex in quite a clever way, but Masumura keeps it plausible, wisely focusing on the characters rather than the plot twists. Being Masumura, he also introduces some discordant elements such as the dissolute aristocratic voyeur. However, although Arrow Video have released some excellent DVD editions of the director’s films recently, I suspect that the comparative lack of sex and violence along with other typical cult movie elements in Two Wives means that this particular film is unlikely to receive such a release. Furthermore, I personally did not feel that Two Wives could in any way be placed in the suspense genre as some have described it. The omission of the novel’s mystery element and the string quartet score – which lends an air of detached melancholy to the proceedings – are evidence that this was not the intention. Instead, it seems to me that Shindo and Masumura were more interested in making a thoughtful adult drama examining lives built on shaky foundations which are easily caused to crumble.

Wakao and Okada played love rivals again the following year in Tadashi Imai's The Time of Reckoning (Fushin no toki), although their roles were reversed, with Okada playing the wife and Wakao the mistress. 

[1] Patrick Quentin is actually a nom de plume of the British writer Hugh Wheeler.

[2] As there is no indication that Junko was ever married to Kenzo, the title seems something of a misnomer.