The characters in this movie are abstractions. They are theoretical constructions hermetically removed from real life. I was having a conversation about this with a friend a few days ago, we agreed that Aki Kaurismaki does this to an extent. The difference is that Kaurismaki's characters say few things but his movies say a lot of different things. Affair in the Snow on the other hand is a theoretical construct so that when it attempts to speak about love and death, the results feel dishonest and fake. The movie does not communicate real life and so if the laws governing the movie world are not true to us then how can anything else in it be?
Mariko Okada is courted by two men; one is rash and abrasive and he represents physical sex, the other is stoic quiet and giving and he represents platonic love, companionship if you will. These are not hinted at by Yoshida, the characters explicitly know they play these roles in Okada's life and Okada is quick to point it out for them and us. She rejects the 'physical sex' guy who in a fit of anger takes off on foot through the snow. 'Platonic love' guy convinces Okada they need to go after him because he might do something foolish and they do; in the process they fall back in love, like they had years ago before Okada moved to the city. This is all very New Wave yet by the end of the movie we get good guys and bad guys and clear distinctions between the two.
Everything is highly stylized here. From the behavior of the characters, the things they say, to the way they enter the frame or pause and turn their heads; everything seems to be done on cue. This ritualized cinema of deliberate movements is pierced through by hand-held cameras that trace circles around faces and follow them down corridors. Some of the images are stunning, like the shot of Okada and one of her lovers walking towards a factory, huge billows of smoke blowing ahead of them like a portent of something, and when the movie stumbles in the snow it all becomes etherial and elusive like we're sleepwalking in a dream.
It's a gorgeous movie to look at but it's something to be looked at, like a landscape photograph; if we hang it on our wall so we can learn something of nature it doesn't work, because the camera has been there to make nature look a certain way, beautiful or idyllic, and we know there's more to it than that. But if we look at it for pictorial reasons, for how space is synthesized and how shapes and figures harmonize, then it works. This is the only way I can appreciate Affair in the Snow; cinema for cinema's sake, for the sheer beauty of the long shot or the elaborate angle. The rest is silly.
