Confession / 色ざんげ / Iro zange (‘Confession of a Love Affair’, 1956)

 

Yuasa (Masayuki Mori) is a middle-aged painter in the process of divorcing his wife (Hisano Yamaoka) and in love with the much younger Tsuyuko (Mie Kitahara), who reciprocates his feelings. However, Tsuyuko’s father (Ichiro Sugai) is dead set against the match and packs her off to America in the hope that she’ll forget about Yuasa. While she’s gone, Yuasa decides he’d better accept the situation and gets married instead to another much younger woman, Tomoko (Keiko Amaji), but she just likes the idea of being married to a famous painter and continues to see her former student boyfriend, Kunihiko (Joe Shishido) on the sly. Then Tsuyuko returns from America…

 

Mie Kitahara

 

This Nikkatsu production was based on a novel originally published as a serial between 1933 and 1935 by Chiyo Uno (female, 1897-1996). The character of Yuasa was based on the painter Seiji Togo (1897-1978), with whom Uno had an affair that lasted from 1930-34. The story must have seemed old-fashioned even in 1956, and it’s doubtful that the film was very successful commercially as Uno’s work was not adapted for the screen again until 1984. Nikkatsu is also a studio not known for its tragic love stories and would soon focus its attention on producing gangster movies aimed at the youth market. 

 

Masayuki Mori and Keiko Amaji

 

The fact that the central character of Yuasa never really convinces or comes to life leaves this film dead in the water. The other characters are constantly making a fuss about what an amazing artist he is, but we see no evidence of this except a not particularly impressive portrait of Tsuyuko dressed like Little Bo Peep. As we never see the beginning of their relationship, it’s impossible to understand how these two were drawn to each other in the first place. Worse still, it seems that we’re expected to sympathise with how hard life must be for Yuasa as a wealthy middle-aged younger-woman magnet who lives a life of idleness. When Tsuyuko’s father understandably prevents him from getting what he wants, Yuasa mopes his way through the remainder of the film wallowing in self-pity, Masayuki Mori rarely deviating from his patented Staring Into The Void expression. 

 

Kinuyo Tanaka

 

Joe Shishido

The cast also includes Kinuyo Tanaka (wasted here as a friend of Yuasa’s) and a thin-faced Joe Shishido before the cheek job, but it’s the great Hisano Yamaoka who steals it here as the ex-wife who’s probably supposed to be a shrew, but for whom I felt quite sympathetic, though not quite as much as I did for Yuasa’s second wife Tomoko when she complains about being, ‘Bored, bored, bored!’ 

 

Hisano Yamaoka

 

This is the first film I’ve seen by director Yutaka Abe (1895-1977), who had lived in America from around 1912-24 and worked in Hollywood, first as an extra and later as a featured actor. This experience led to him becoming a director after his return to Japan, and he directed his first film there in 1925. I can’t say that I was much impressed by his work in Confession, in which he lets the same scene between Mori and Shishido play out twice (first on a beach, then again immediately afterwards in a hotel room) and uses waves crashing against rocks as a visual metaphor for passion – something I’m pretty sure was a hoary old cliché even then.

Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

Thanks to A.K. 

 

Gyakukosen / 逆光線 / (‘Backlight’, 1956)

Obscure Japanese Film #199

Mie Kitahara

Following on from the commercial success earlier in 1956 of their films Season of the Sun and Crazed Fruit, this was Nikkatsu’s stab at a female-centred ‘sun tribe’ movie - ‘sun tribe’ being a term adopted by the Japanese press in reference to the first film to describe what was then a new phenomenon: rebellious, spoilt teenagers, generally from wealthy families, who despised the older generation and were unapologetically interested only in gratifying their own desires. Like Season of the Sun, this one was directed by Takumi Furukawa, a lesser director than Ko Nakahira, who had made Crazed Fruit, the female star of which was Mie Kitahara, who stars again here. 

 

Kitahara and Shoji Yasui

 

Kitahara plays Reiko, a student who shares a dormitory with other female students and who, in this case, does not seem to be from a wealthy family or even to have a family – certainly no reference is made to one, and she has to take on various part-time jobs to get by. What marks Reiko out as different is her attitude to sex – she likes to take the initiative and, early on in the film, she makes advances to a male student, Maki (Shoji Yasui), literally throwing herself at him and biting the button off his jacket. The two begin having a relationship, but one in which traditional roles are reversed – in this case, it’s the man who wants marriage and complains that she only loves him for his body, while she wants no commitment, only to have a good time. Reiko also has a one-night stand with Teramura (Kyoji Aoyama), incurring the wrath of his fiancé / her classmate Motoko (Misako Watanabe) as a result. But it’s when she begins tutoring a young boy at his home and seduces his father (Hiroshi Nihonyanagi) that she really begins playing with fire… 

 

Hiroshi Nihonyanagi

 

Whereas the previous two films had been based on stories by Shintaro Ishihara, the source for Gyakukosen was a novel of the same name by Kunie Iwahashi (1934-2014). Apparently, on its publication (also in 1956), there was ‘a frenzy of media coverage of her as the female equivalent of Ishihara’ (Japanese Wikipedia). 

 

 

Although it may seem like fairly tame stuff today, there’s no doubt that the sexual frankness of this film and the carefully-calculated moments of uninhibited sensuality on Reiko’s part (another example being the scene in which she takes a drink of water from Teramura’s mouth at a drinking fountain) would have been quite shocking at the time. The problem with the film is that it comes across less as a heartfelt plea for sexual equality and more like a cynically motivated product designed to stir up controversy and extract as many yen as possible from the pockets of Japanese teenagers. The sun tribe genre proved to be extremely short-lived as there was some evidence that a number of rapes and sexual assaults had been committed by youngsters influenced by the films. This led to protests by concerned parents and teachers, who were successful in having the genre effectively banned by the end of the year. As Liam Grealy and Catherine Driscoll point out in an online article, there were really only five sun tribe films proper, all of which were released in 1956, the other two being Kon Ichikawa’s Punishment Room and Hiromichi Horikawa’s Summer in Eclipse.

 

 

One oddity of this film is that it features a great deal of group singing of Russian folk songs by the young people, presumably a reflection of the fact that communism had become popular in Japan during the post-war years and had inspired an interest in Russian culture. Gyakukosen is largely unremarkable in terms of cinematic craft – the ending is really the only part that is visually memorable – and probably only of interest to fans of Mie Kitahara or anyone with an interest in the sun tribe phenomenon. 

 

 Thanks to A.K. 

Snow Country / 雪国 / Yukiguni (1965)

Obscure Japanese Film #198

 

Shima Iwashita

 

Yasunari Kawabata’s novel Snow Country began to appear in fragmented chapters in 1935, but was not published in its final form until 1948. Set in the mid-1930s at a hot spring resort somewhere in the mountains in the west of Japan’s main island, Honshu, it concerns Shimamura, a writer who rather absurdly writes about Western dancing despite never having witnessed a performance. A married man and father with a certain amount of independent wealth, he’s an idler who travels to the resort alone and meets Komako, a young woman whose company the innkeeper arranges as all of the town’s geisha are already booked for a big party. The two are quickly attracted to one another – Komako  falls for him a little too hard, although Shimamura is more reserved and has no intention of leaving his wife. Still, after returning home from his trip, he finds himself unable to forget Komako and returns to see her on two further occasions, by which time she has become a full-fledged geisha. Shimamura also becomes interested in Yoko, a young woman with whom Komako has an uneasy relationship due to their mutual connection to Yukio, a young man dying of tuberculosis who had been Komako’s childhood friend, possibly fiancée, and is now being cared for by Yoko…

 

Isao Kimura

 

Snow Country was first filmed in 1957 by director Shiro Toyoda for Toho with Keiko Kishi as Komako, Ryo Ikebe as Shimamura and Kaoru Yachigusa as Yoko. This Shochiku version directed by Hideo Oba a mere eight years later is by no means a carbon copy. Most obviously, whereas the earlier film was shot in academy ratio black and white and ran 143 minutes, this film is in colour and widescreen and (mercifully) runs 21 minutes shorter. Oba’s reputation is considerably less distinguished than Toyoda’s – probably rightly so – but in some respects his film does manage to improve on the previous one. 

 

 

As played by Keiko Kishi, Komako came across as childish, over-emotional and actually quite annoying, her mood changing by the minute, whereas Shima Iwashita somehow manages to avoid the pitfalls of playing Kawabata’s heroine, making her appeal for Shimamura much more understandable (although why she should be drawn to him so much is less clear). The music is also an improvement – there was way too much of it in Toyoda’s film, and the quality was also poor, but Naozumi Yamamoto’s superior score is used more sparingly and effectively even if it is occasionally on the syrupy side. 

 

 

On the other hand, as Shimamura, Isao Kimura (a respected actor but not a big star), lacks Ryo Ikebe’s charisma and makes little impression, while Toyoda’s snowscapes were more visually arresting even without the benefit of colour and widescreen. The underwritten character of Yoko is a thankless role in both films, but I felt that Kaoru Yachigusa managed it better than Mariko Kaga does here. Incidentally, Chieko Naniwa – who played the head maid in the earlier picture – somehow managed to get herself cast again here, this time playing the blind masseur. 

 

Mariko Kaga

 

Like the novel, Toyoda began his film with Shimamura’s second visit before flashing back to the first, while Oba has opted for a chronological timeline and also added a little narration from Shimamura which works well. Toyoda had found it more convenient to make Shimamura a painter, while Oba retains the character’s occupation as described by Kawabata, but adds a scene with Shimamura’s wife (played by Kaneko Iwasaki), who is only spoken about in both the book and the first film. One aspect that both films have in common is to resolve some of the ambiguity of the novel, in which it’s never really clear whether Shimamura and Komako sleep together or whether Yoko survives the climactic fire – both filmmakers strongly imply that the relationship is consummated and clarify the fate of Yoko. The two films both have their strengths and weaknesses and it will be a matter of personal opinion which one is preferred, but in my view Kawabata’s famous work is not terribly well-suited to film adaptation. 

 

 

In regard to Hideo Oba, a director best-known for his What’s Your Name? trilogy (1953-54), but still obscure to most, I suspect that his previously-reviewed film The Invisible Wall (1958) was a random assignment that did not especially interest him, whereas this was a project he at least put his heart into even if it’s no masterpiece. Like the other four films I’ve seen by him, it’s well made but not particularly inspired, original or individual. It was his sixtieth film out of the 64 he would direct and his final screenplay credit out of 14, as well as his fourth of five films with star Shima Iwashita, and it’s fans of Iwashita who are likely to find this film most rewarding.

Unfortunately, the colour photography did not look its best on the rather low-res copy I watched. 

 

 DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)