A Portrait of Shunkin / 春琴抄 / Shunkinsho (1976)

Obscure Japanese Film #154

Momoe Yamaguchi

 

Doshomachi, Osaka, early Meiji era (c.1870s). Okoto (Momoe Yamaguchi), the youngest daughter of the wealthy owner of a wholesale medicine company, has lost her sight due to a childhood illness. She takes a liking to Sasuke (Tomokazu Miura), a young apprentice employed by her father, and soon he is the only person she will allow to escort her to her music lessons and help her with other tasks. Okoto becomes proficient at playing the instrument whose name she shares (the koto, the ‘O’ being a polite prefix), inspiring the devoted Sasuke to take up the more humble samisen, which he practises in secret. 

Tomokazu Miura

 

Initially, Sasuke gets into trouble for being more concerned with looking after Okoto and learning music than he is about learning the trade. However, Okoto has become extremely stubborn and difficult to deal with since losing her sight, so her parents decide to release Sasuke from his normal duties and allow him to be Okoto’s full-time companion – even paying for him to have music lessons from Okoto’s teacher – in the hope that this will soothe her anger and improve her character.  Meanwhile, Okoto’s beauty has led to her attracting the attention of wealthy playboy Minoya (Masahiko Tsugawa), who begins laying plans to seduce her… 

Yamaguchi with Masahiko Tsugawa

 

Later in the story, Okoto becomes a music teacher herself and takes the name of Shunkin, hence the title. Junichiro Tanizaki’s 1933 novella of the same name (available in a good English translation in the collection Seven Japanese Tales) was first filmed in 1935 by Yasujiro Shimazu in a version starring Kinuyo Tanaka. At the time, talking pictures were still relatively new in a Japan which was lagging a few years behind Hollywood in this department. As the story features both music and birdsong quite prominently, it must have seemed a good choice by which to exploit the possibilities of the new sound medium. Other versions followed: in 1954, Daisuke Ito directed Machiko Kyo as Okoto, while in 1961 Teinosuke Kinugasa made a third version starring Fujiko Yamamoto. Up to this point, each film had featured a big female star, with the role of Sasuke being played by a more minor male co-star. Kaneto Shindo broke this pattern in 1972 with his version, entitled Sanka (‘Hymn’), which featured the unknown Tokuko Watanabe in the role. Shindo also restored the novella’s framing device, which uses a first-person narrator visiting the graves of Okoto and Sasuke and meeting their former maid – now an old woman – whom he persuades to tell him their story. In Sanka, Shindo himself plays the narrator, while his mistress Nobuko Otowa takes the role of the maid, so it seems likely that Shindo followed the book in this regard mainly to provide a role for Otowa, who was too old to play Okoto. 

 

Given that Okoto continues to treat Sasuke like a servant even after they become lovers and is often cruel to him, Tanizaki’s story can equally be interpreted as a story of how Sasuke’s unwavering devotion represents the ideal of true love, or as a story about the perfect sado-masochistic relationship. Unlike the previous film versions, Shindo’s very much emphasizes the latter reading, even going so far as to have Sasuke reverently burying his mistress’s shit in the garden every day – a detail not present in the book. However, considering that Tanizaki’s title was not Okoto and Sasuke but A Portrait of Shunkin, it’s also possible that his main concern was to provide a character study of a woman whose sense of pride means that she absolutely refuses to behave like a victim and for that reason would rather be thought cruel than allow anyone to feel sorry for her. 

 

Made just four years later, director Katsumi Nishikawa’s 1976 version – the fifth – returns to the more conventional interpretation of the tale as a tragic love story, with a screenplay co-written by Nishikawa and Teinosuke Kinugasa, who had directed the 1961 version. A lot of care evidently went into the making of this one, and it’s very pretty to look at. Its raison d’etre was clearly to provide a vehicle for stars Momoe Yamaguchi and Tomokazu Miura. Yamaguchi – who first came to fame as a 13-year-old pop singer in 1972 – was such a phenomenon in Japan in the 1970s that she even has a chapter devoted to her in Mark Schilling’s Encyclopedia of Japanese Pop Culture. Her first major film part was in a version of another oft-filmed literary work, Yasunari Kawabata’s The Izu Dancer in 1974, the first of seven films for director Katsumi Nishikawa but also, more significantly, the first of 12 features in which she co-starred with Tomokazu Miura. The two soon became known as the ‘golden combination’, and were married in 1980, at which point Yamaguchi retired from show business to become a full-time wife and mother but continued to be hounded by both the media and her obsessive fans. 

 

Yamaguchi and Miura give decent performances in A Portrait of Shunkin, as do the rest of the cast, and it’s a well-made film. However, with Masaru Sato’s syrupy music ladled all over the soundtrack, I found its pretty sentimentality a bit cloying for my taste and prefer Shimazu’s early attempt or even Shindo’s more eccentric take on the story. 

DVD at Amazon Japan

English subtitles

 

Sanshiro Sugata / 姿三四郎 (1977)

Obscure Japanese Film #48

Tomokazu Miura and Kumiko Akiyoshi

 

Sanshiro Sugata (1943) was, of course, the directorial debut of a certain Akira Kurosawa, who had persuaded Toho Studios to buy the rights to Tsuneo Tomita’s just-published novel of the same name. Sugata is a fictional character based on Shiro Saigo (1866-1922), an early practitioner of judo who became one of the masters of the art. Tomita himself was the son of another judo champ, Tsunejiro Tomita, who had been an associate of Saigo’s. Kurosawa’s commercial instincts had proven sound on that occasion – so much so, in fact, that the studio pressured him into making a sequel, which was released just as the war was coming to an end. Between that film and this 1977 version, there had been a further four remakes, including a 1965 film produced by Kurosawa himself. This was apparently a scene-for-scene remake of the first two films, but it was not well-received by the critics and seems to have all but destroyed the career of its young director, Seiichiro Uchikawa, whose previous film (Samurai from Nowhere) had shown definite promise.

Kihachi Okamoto (right) on set

 

Kihachi Okamoto was an eccentric and often brilliant director whose work suffered a sharp decline in quality as the ‘60s ended and the ‘70s began. The reasons for this are debatable, but in my opinion none of his films from 1970 onwards really work, and his talent became less and less evident as time went on. This is a pity, because his mid-period movies such as Sword of Doom, Oh Bomb! and The Human Bullet are stunning. Unfortunately, his remake of Sanshiro Sugata (newly released on DVD in Japan) proves not to have been a return to form. In fact, it copies a great deal from the Kurosawa original, from the blurry point-of-view shot seen through the eyes of a nearly knocked-out opponent to the climactic fight on the windswept hill. There is one scene in which Okamoto subverts our expectations – in the original, Sugata had thrown away his geta (wooden sandals) when volunteering to drive judo master Shogoro Yano’s rickshaw; Kurosawa had used this to create a striking montage sequence in which we see what happens to one of the geta with the passage of time. In Okamoto’s version, he is about to throw them away, but thinks better of it and ties them to the rickshaw handle. Some of the fight scenes could be said to be an improvement on Kurosawa’s, but the shot of an opponent flying through the air worked in 1943 because it was so brief, whereas Okamoto makes it completely absurd by extending the shot and adding a ridiculous sound effect. Indeed, this Sanshiro Sugata, with its pop song theme tune, jaunty score and broad performances suggests that the intended audience was 10-year-old boys. Incidentally, the lame music is by none other than Masaru Sato, who had once given us one of the great film scores of all time for Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. 

Tatsuya Nakadai

 

That Okamoto assembled an all-star cast mostly goes for very little. Tatsuya Nakadai is fine as Sugata’s teacher, Shogoro Yano (played by Toshiro Mifune in 1965), but it’s hardly one of his better roles. Nevertheless, he clearly did some of his own stunts and looks more convincingly formidable than Denjiro Okochi did in the 1943 film. We also get Kumiko Akiyoshi as the love interest, Tomisaburo ‘Lone Wolf’ Wakayama as her father (Takashi Shimura in the original), Kyoko ‘Woman in the Dunes’ Kishida as an older woman who tries to seduce Sanshiro, Atsuo Nakamura as Gennosuke Higaki (the main villain of the piece), Kunie Tanaka as Sanshiro’s best friend and Tetsuro Tanba in an especially thankless role as a senior member of Yano’s school. 

 

Daisuke Ryu

Nakadai’s real-life acting student Daisuke Ryu also makes his film debut as one of the attackers whom Nakadai hurls into the canal. The lead is played by the boyish Tomokazu Miura, a teen heartthrob type who could act a bit; he’s adequate, but never really convinces as a man of the 19^th-century and I prefer Susumu Fujita in the original. 

Kunie Tanaka, Akiyoshi and Miura

 

The film was mostly shot with a handheld camera long before it became de rigeur, but I can’t say it adds much and it’s really only the fact that it’s in Panavision that prevents this looking like a TV drama. The screenplay was co-written by Okamoto and Nakadai’s wife, Yasuko Miyazaki. The first hour and 40 minutes follow the first Kurosawa film, while the final 40 minutes feature the karate-schooled brothers of Gennosuke Higaki who are out for vengeance and appeared in Kurosawa's 1945 sequel. The role of the heroine has been greatly expanded (the character was little more than a cipher in Kurosawa’s films) and the new character of Sanshiro’s best friend is given quite a few scenes, in one of which he is brutally attacked by Gennosuke Higaki and left with a permanently twisted arm. No longer able to fight, he later turns up with a gun! One wonders if this role was created especially for Kunie Tanaka, who must have been double-jointed as his broken limb is so convincing and is, in fact, the highlight of this otherwise disappointing movie. 

Watched without subtitles.