Uncouth Reflections

Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:

An exceptionally beautiful melodrama that, though it never delivers on its narrative and thematic promises, is the kind of thing that seems to live in your memory even as you’re watching it. Director Shiro Toyoda is reminiscent of Stahl or Borzage in that he’s adept at building his lovers’ interludes into self-contained narrative pantomimes, ones whose slowed-down hyper-reality lends their participants’ actions a potential energy that charges and sustains the air of erotic self-involvement. Shot on location in a snow-heavy resort town, the movie is consistently eye-popping, and Toyoda is able to uncork a few genre images of brimming, Brueghel-like intensity. (A nighttime children’s rite is haunting and arcane, like something out of Tarkovsky’s “Andrei Rublev.”) As Komako, a geisha struggling to find her place in society (aren’t they all?), Keiko Kishi provides the movie with a beguiling focal point. At turns slinky and taut, and seemingly always on the precipice of hysteria, the performance is terrifying in its evocation of femininity in its most elemental and undiluted form (it made me think of Asta Nielsen). In fact, Kishi’s performance is so vivid that it unbalances the movie: When, in the second half, Toyoda stages a tug-of-war between Komako and her foster-sister Yoko (Kaoru Yachigusa), the contest feels lopsided, because it’s hard to see the heretofore below-the-radar Yoko as a valid competitor to the feline temptress we’ve been watching from the movie’s start. (Lacking a solid foundation in character, their spats nearly tip into camp.) And though the story casts Komako’s lover, Shimamura (Ryo Ikebe), as something of a waffling playboy, it’s hard to criticize his indecisiveness, which often feels like a rational expression of male self-preservation. “Bitches be crazy,” you can almost hear him thinking.

Related

• The movie was based on a famous novel by Yasunari Kawabata. Anyone read it?
• Toyoda’s excellent “Wild Geese” (aka “The Mistress”) is available to stream on Hulu+.