Comme une fleur des champs

By now, I have almost turned stoic under the stream of excellent films, but this was a magical one! At once a mesmerizing ode to the emotion of 'love', a subtle critique on the Japanese society of the time and a thing of gorgeous beauty in every frame, this movie is a really fulfilling one. It is rich in emotional intensity, in the typically subdued manner that fits Japan, yet reaching out and effecting you. The story is of a girl and a boy who fall in love and all that ensues around them, including pressures from family, society, demands of life, etc. and with a denouement that is heartrending, to say the least. The camera drenched in mood is amazing, and the soundtrack at places is really marvelous, beautifully supplementing the film's sombre tone. Kinoshita brings romance into perspective, putting stress on the journey and not the results, and this along with Dvoje has to be two of the most complete explorations of 'love' I have seen. At minor phases, the movie might be a little stagnant or melodramatic but otherwise, its entire body sparkles with technical brilliance and innocent poignancy. Contrasted with the social behaviors that other character's exhibit, Masao and Tamiko's saga assumes an aura of purity, and ironically, also of a battle. All of the movie is narrated through the memories of an old man who returns to his home land, and the effect used on the film actually gives us a feeling that we are taking a trip down somebody's inner mind; and this is just another example of the well done technical aspects that come together to serve up a stirring, deep and 'cinematographic-ally' magnificent tale of transcendental romance. The last few moments and lines are lovely to experience, sure to touch everybody at some place.

Chishû Ryû is seventy-three years old. He is visiting the estate he grew up on, traveling on the river river; the train is faster, but when he was young, there was no railroad. He has good eyes and good hearing still, but he's getting old. He thinks, as he travels, of when he was fifteen and in love with his cousin, Noriko Arita.

They had grown up together, and at fifteen, he didn't quite understand what he was feeling at first, nor the constant disapproval, nor the overheard conversations. She was two years older than he, so it was impossible.... besides, his sister-in-law knew it would mean giving up a large part of the estate.

It's a bittersweet movie from Keisuke Kinoshita, far more sad than his usual bitter wont. That is almost certainly due to his source material, a novel by Sachio Ito. The anger is directed less at institutions and more at people.

The camerawork is directed by Kinoshita's longtime DP, Hiroshi Kusuda, and the oval matte of the scenes when the protagonist was 15 renders the image of a rural Japan before the turn of the century more lovely than usual; the compositions have an antique feeling, that match the contemplative words of Chishû Ryû's musing narration. the images are offered in long, slow takes, often long takes that allow the audience to admire the beauty of the natural world in its innocence.

This film is based on Sachio Ito's novel titled "Nogiku no Haka" literally meaning "The Grave in a Daisy Flower Bed." The novel starts with a thirty-something Masao's monologue in which he decides to write down what happened to him and Tamiko when he was young. He says he cannot stop thinking of those happy and sad days over and over again. Masao remembers that Tamiko was pressured by the family and relatives to accept a marriage offer and died not long after she got married. Masao is married now through a similar marriage arrangement. At the end of the novel, Masao recalls the day when he visited the home of Tamiko's parents soon after her death. Masao was told that Tamiko was holding his photograph and a letter in her hand when she was found dead. It was the letter he gave her just before he left home to start a new school life. Masao and Tamiko's family visited her grave together and he saw her graveyard surrounded by full of daisies. He planted more daisies around. He admits his lasting emotion of love. In the film version, Kinoshita, the director, extends the original story by portraying Masao as an aged man of 73 years old. The elderly gentleman is on a dingy being rowed against the stream on his way to Tamiko's grave. The creation of an old Masao was an excellent cinematic achievement by the master director, who was able to enhance an incidental and passing emotion felt between two people in their youth into an eternal life-long love that is profoundly touching the emotions of the audience of all ages. "My First Love Affair" was chosen for the title of this film but it seems to miss the point that the director may have wished to make in the film. "My Love" or "My Only Love" may ring better as the title of this masterpiece. Kinoshita chose a title "Nogiku no Gotoki Kimi nariki", literally meaning "You were like a daisy in the field".

The style of this film manages to be at once naturalistic, sentimental, and at times highly dramatic. The minutiae of daily life in a village makes the settings very real indeed. Harvesting and threshing rice, picking "egg-apples" and cotton in the mountains, gossiping over dinner.

The boy and girl, whose childhood innocence but very strong friendship seamlessly turns into more adult love (though thoroughly chaste), are mercilessly taunted by nearly everyone close to them. The impression is of a relationship developing under total and minute scrutiny. This sort of thing can happen anywhere, particularly in a small village, but in a Japanese village, the atmosphere for the young couple is beyond claustrophobic, even when they are in the wide open spaces.

The tone of the story is, and is enhanced by the generally restrained performances, highly emotional, sometimes veering towards melodrama. Though I would be hard pressed to describe this story as a romance, I can well imagine some viewers being moved to tears by the unfairness and injustice of it all.

The story was rather too simple for my liking, though this could be unfair, because I am comparing it to masterworks by the same director, such as Happiness For Us Alone. Nevertheless, the story becomes powerful and effecting towards the end, and is difficult to forget.