La source thermale d'Akitsu

"Akitsu onsen" is one of the real and the best masterpiece in the history of Japanese cinema. It is not a lie. This is a little story on love affairs of a couple, and on an end of the love, and, on an endless love between 17 years until the death of a woman. We movie fan must see this film. There are not only Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu in Japan. The director, Yoshishige Yoshida, explained in this sweet and bitter melodrama that all the trials for the democracy in Japan after the World War II had not succeeded at all.

Yoshida was one of the great directors in Japan, but until now, he would never make the films like as "Akitsu onsen". His work became more radical year by year after he departed from Shochiku Ofuna Studio.

This film moves at a painfully slow pace, with the same, monotonous theme music playing over and over in the background until you want to scream. There is no real chemistry between the actors who are supposed to be deeply in love. She chases after him, clings to him, pines for him, he goes, he returns, he goes, returns, and on and on and on. Finally, you just want the movie to be over. By the end, I felt that I had just wasted two hours of my life.

At some point after her lover has left her to get married to another woman, a forlorn Mariko Okada, hostess of the Akitsu Inn, looks up and says "the Inn is all I have left" and Yoshida frames her from behind the bars of a panel door like a captive of her own prison. Her character remains one for the rest of the movie until the very end, and that type of visual poignancy is the best I got out of Akitsu Springs. There is more of course.

In the first third we get romantic melodrama played to operatic bombast and pastoral colors, against the backdrop of Japan's surrender to the Allies Mariko Okada nurses back to health (and the will to live) a man suffering from tuberculosis come to the hot springs of Akitsu to recuperate. They fall in love, the type of love produced on demand to be the soulmate/love of a lifetime type of love without the movie earning it for its characters, and then the man proposes to Mariko to commit a double suicide - perhaps the most classically poetic statement of undying love in Japanese culture. But it's too early for that, the relationship has not matured to that point, and so the woman laughs. Then he goes away to get married to some other woman and she stays behind to work the Akitsu Inn. For the rest of the movie the man makes "10 years later" reappearances in the village and Mariko tells him they should die together.

This is a movie of gaps, in time and emotion, a chronicle not of impossible love, because that love was burned out and played out quickly and then left behind so that we're looking at the broken shell of that love and the faded memory of it; it's a chronicle of compulsion, of lives unfulfilled and chances missed, of relationships where one partner loves and remembers more than the other. At some point the man says "we've lived our lives" and I like bittersweet fatalism but these are only words scripted by Yoshida. The movie he creates around them is weak, it falters, because the foundations are weak. Because, before the question "why did you have to die?" can be asked in the movie's finale, the question "why did you fall in love?" must be at least posed, and it's not, so it's all a bit inconsequential and unconvincing as far as that goes. Like the movie is so keen to set itself up a certain way that specifics are never given much thought. It doesn't matter why they fell in love but how they fall out of it and what is created to replace that love it would seem, but when lines like "you taught me how to live" are played out in the first 20 minutes, what's left for the rest of the movie to go? Yoshida makes up for it in the end with tragic irony; now Mariko is the one who goes away and the man has to sit behind and wait.

This is old fashioned stuff for 1962, a Shochiku romance that will probably appeal to fans of Mikio Naruse; me, when I want to stare compulsion right in the eye, I'll stick with Yasuzo Masumura's actually daring movies, where the eroticism is perverse and pathos manifests in frightening ways. Yoshida himself would outgrow this film in due time, here he is still reworking the great classics.

Seeing this was one of the factors that led to my moving to Japan. I think that this film best captured the intense mood symbolizing the changes of modernization overcoming Japan in the postwar era. I look forward to seeing it once more, but ironically, it is next to impossible to find in Japan. If anyone is aware of how to get a copy of this film over the internet (legally of course) or in a retail store, i would welcome any news. This is my first post concerning what I believe to be an all time classic. I have met few people who have read the book and even fewer who have seen the movie in Japan. Still I think that many others have seen this film internationally. I last saw this film in the mid 1980's. It has been a long wait.

Featuring one of Japan's finest actresses, Mariko Okada, "Akitsu Onsen" is one of the most essential Japanese films of the 1960's.

Joining post-war background, devotion, loneliness and passion, Yoshishige Yoshida creates a remarkably beautiful and lyric film - relying only on the two main characters relations.

Okada, who had already worked with one of the greatest Film Directors in History, Yajusiro Ozu, handles the part with exceptionable beauty and charm.

While Hiroyuki Nagato's performance solid, it has not enough depth for us to take real interest in him - it serves only as a background for Mariko Okada to shine and show her incredible charm, innocence and acting skills.

As most Asian Directors, Yoshida has a sharp eye for framing, and this comes across in every second. Every shot and plane is perfectly balanced, giving the film a beautiful look. Seldom have I seen better framing in a Film. The Japanese once again demonstrate their extreme talent with Film composition and aesthetics. Contrary to what many think, Kurosawa is not the only Japanese director with such talent.

In the end, Mariko Okada and Yoshishige Yoshida (wife and husband) are one of the most defining Director-Actress couples in Film History (along with Yimou Zhang/Gong Li and Ingmar Bergman/Liv Ullman).

I had the honor to meet both Yoshida and Okada at the 27th São Paulo International Film Festival in 2003, and they proved two be two exceptionally humble and pleasant people.

I demand a Criterion Collection DVD right now. Not only of "Akitsu Onsen" but of all Yoshida and Okada films.

Don't miss this one.