Lettre d'amour

"People denounce them as the sin of the war. But who will atone for the sin?"

A window into post-war Japan that is sympathetic to the plight of women, perhaps naturally as it was the first film directed by Kinuyo Tanaka and it was written by progressive director Keisuke Kinoshita. However, it's one that also reveals the constraints of the day, which in several instances were less than pleasant, admittedly from the viewpoint of a very different culture, and seven decades later.

The film is about a veteran who was devastated when his love from childhood married another man during the war, her father advising her at the time not to wait for him as he could die any minute. Ironically, he lived, and the man she married died, leaving her a poor window. To make ends meet, like many other women, she became the lover of an American serviceman after the war, one who has now left her and is back in the States. Feeling herself unworthy, she's written her childhood love that she's married, and tells him "I wish I could throw away everything and run into your embrace," which devastates him. By chance, however, he runs into her again. He's taken a job writing "love letters" for Japanese women in English for their American boyfriends, you see, and overhears her in there one day.

This sets up the central conflict of the film, the fact that after they parted, he was always faithful to her, while she slept with a foreigner, and on top of it had a despised "blue-eyed baby" which died (this ugly reference to racial impurity is mentioned in just a single line). In a bit of obvious symbolism, Tanaka shows the guy in front of the statue of the incredibly loyal dog Hachiko at Shibuya station, subject of a later tearjerker, which had been erected in 1934, in case his virtue wasn't obvious to us. When he finds out what's she's really been up to, he lets the moral condemnation flow. "But why did you let an American soldier have you? Who killed your husband? It could have been the man you slept with," he preaches, rejecting her. For much of the film he thus has the moral high ground, while she is judged severely, of course meekly taking it, which was difficult to watch.

Tanaka's filmmaking had some very lovely moments though, such as when the train door closes with the lovers at the platform, and the we're whisked back into the past, with a beautiful scene from childhood and another between his mother and the girl before he'll be going off to war. Her camera moves in ways that seem very natural. It was also quite nice to see footage in Japan from 1953, and the film to be unfettered by American censors, who had left the year before. Along those lines, there seemed to be a little bit of glee in making these women so faithless to their American boyfriends, their gushing letters invented and written by a male translator while they sit on impassively, smoking, and in one case moving on from one letter to the next.

The first half of this film, filling in the story, is quite strong, but the back half lags, made worse by the moral condemnation. It's too bad some of this time wasn't devoted to expanding on the story of the brother's girlfriend, who was perky and a lot of fun. Wouldn't it have been nice if she had had a skeleton of some sort in her closet too, or for that matter, had we found out about some of the sins of the Japanese servicemen re: comfort women? But I digress, of course that wasn't going to be in here.

There is redemption which comes along, perhaps in the best possible form for Japan in 1953, but it certainly had a giant asterisk on it. In a scene where the young woman runs into three of the other women she used to hang out with near the American base, she is carefully distinguished from these "real wh*res" as a "different kind of women." Ugh. Later as she's questioned alone, we find that she had been with only had one American lover, when two or three would have been available. Oh, thank goodness, she's not a slut!

On the other hand, with the guy, it's his wise co-worker who comes to the rescue, slapping him around in one scene and saying "Unforgiveable? It's your egotism. Who do you think you are? A saint?" And later, most critically, "He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone. All of us Japanese are responsible for the war. And all of us struggled through the postwar days. Who can throw a stone at whom?" He doesn't mention Hirohito or disastrous Japanese military aggression, but maybe viewers simply read between the lines.

It was in these final moments that the film redeemed itself somewhat with me. There is certainly an aura of forgiveness and moving on about it, a nation still processing what the aftermath of the war had meant, but I just wish it hadn't carried the righteous anger towards Japanese women so long, and had been a little broader in what it was examining. Pretty impressive debut film though.

You rarely expect an actor, no matter how great, to simply ease into the director's chair, especially not in her debut. The thing that struck me the most is how daring she is in regard to composition and style. This does not feel Japanese! In fact it moves almost like an early piece from the French New Wave.

The strict composition of formality and form is nowhere to be seen. Instead of calculated and rigid Tanaka places the camera slightly to the side or slightly higher than Mizoguchi, Kinoshita (who wrote the scrips), Ozu, Naruse, Ichikawa and any of the other masters of cinema in 1950s Japan. The camera moves, a lot, especially on the streets, giving you the feeling of true cinema verité - thought is also clear that this is not an experiment, nor consistently forced, only used when it's natural for the story.

Breaking with the traditions of Japanese cinema does however fit perfectly with the movie itself, where it's characters also break away from the traditions, morals and standards of old. We follow Masayuki Mori, a broken returned soldier barely scraping by while supported by his younger brother. He has a longing. Upon meeting an old friend he gets into a business he had not thought likely - writing "love letters" to American GIs from their mistresses, often several GIs per woman (many of whom are also prostitutes).

One day the woman he has been longing for and searching for comes in for the exact same purpose. Though described as a melodrama, and yes the label may to an extent fit, Tanaka takes the harsh issues straight on and elevates it with her almost unbelievable prowess. What a natural!

Masayuki Mori came out of the War at loose ends. For half a decade he has had no ambition except to find Yoshiko Kuga. They had loved each other, but he had just graduated from the Naval Academy and was going to war; her father had arranged a marriage, and with a difficult stepmother, she had accepted. The marriage was a failure, the husband had died, and More had been looking for her in a desultory fashion since.

Now things are looking up for him. An old friend has a business writing letters for the girlfriends of US soldiers returned stateside, asking for money. With Mori's Academy education, he turns out effective letters, and works with his brother, whose business is buying the latest American books and magazines cheap and selling them at cover price, Because they are airmailed to service personnel, these goods are available before the standard importers can put them out. Mori is happy, practicing his craft, until he overhears his partner writing a letter for Miss Kuga.

It's Kinuyo Tanaka's first time as director, and working with a script co-written by Keisuke Kinoshita, there's a sharp and disapproving paradox at its heart. Mori disapproves of Miss Kuga's failure to adhere to traditional Japanese values, and rants at her the popular anti-American sentiments of the day, even as he and his brother participate in other aspects of the trade. There's a message of forgiveness, but it's tinged with self-loathing and misogyny; Mori's living situation with a male friend, who cleans his clothes and puts him to bed when he's drunk has a homosexual tinge to it.

Still, the performances are sharp, the camerawork is fine, and there's one sequence in which Miss Kuga encounters Jûzô Dôsan, Mori's brother, in which the conversation is punctuated with their umbrellas that is a delight.