Memories of Matsuko

Thankfully I had seen "Amelie" and "Run Lola Run/Lola Rennt" before watching this. In all three films the usage of music as a prop, bold coloring, different speeds, odd and interesting angles, vivid cinematography, flashbacks, surrealism, eccentric characters, animated graphics, and other features of what I would call Expressionism, come to the fore, the entirety of the films' duration, each.

Amelie, for all its uniqueness, was actually at the end of it all rather boring, despite looking like a painting that's come to life, with an army of quirky people leaping out into a musical number of a film. (When it was finished each of the several times I watched it and honestly did enjoy it, I honestly didn't feel much connection to the characters though I understand exactly what their significance to the story is.) There's other odd French films, called "Micmacs" and "Delicatessen." By I think the same director as Amelie. At 1st I thought this was just a French style. But the bizarre visuals and retrospective storytelling seem to be characteristic of the filmmaker. So perhaps the director of "Memories of Matsuko" is pulling directly from Amelie's influence and not a broad genre of French film that I thought existed lol I mention Amelie and Run Lola Run and these other films because they did train my mind and eyes to this kind of artistry. But with Matsuko, it was not just used as an excuse to be odd and creative, like Amelie, but here it was completely necessary. In the 1st few minutes I was about to click this movie off, with the vaudevillian and fairy tale stuff and highly saturated colors; I wanted a taste of real life, modern Japan tied into a wowing film and the initial presence of Matsuko did not fulfill that. But after coming to review "Bounce KO Gals," a Japanese lolita film, I saw someone link other lolita films like "Kamikaze Girls" to "World of Kanako," to this film. And in liking those story lines and way of filming, I gave Matsuko a chance.

Since then, I figured that the whimsy of the song-and-dance style and harp playing and twinkle dust introducing this film was completely sarcastic. And it was. The unbearable interludes of musicals lasted briefly, popped up minimally, but they and the intense colors sooner than later showed their purpose: Matsuko was a lonely child with a vivid imagination, and went to the carnival with her dad as a kid and they saw theatrical plays. That was the film's only moment of he and her bonding.

So the musicals and coloring just visually expresses Matsuko's mental and emotional state. It introduced the rapid on screen downfall of our titular character, Matsuko herself. And it made me tear up. But I actually let the tears storm down when she was older and visited back home well into her extraordinarily troubled adulthood. I saw someone around here write that they didn't quite get the last scene with Matsuko as a child and then as an adult peacefully singing her utopian theme song as she climbed up the stairs to a heavenlike light shining down from her childhood bedroom, with her deceased sister angelically awaiting her to reach the top, whilst every friend and ex Matsuko had sung along in misery.

How can they not get this? Are they a sociopath or what? Maybe they've never been sad and daydreamed before so good for them but when you know you're unloved you then fantasize about being loved, or at least your former tormentors repenting how horribly they treated you, as you triumph how you realistically never did or would or could. And that's what the last scene shows. It was similar to Pan's Labyrinth, showing a finally happy Ophelia in a fanciful paradise; as her actual self took her last breaths, the make-believe Ophelia was being applauded by a kingdom and praised by her long dead parents. That too made me cry then. I realise this is what the director was doing here, not necessarily taking cues exactly from Pan.

It's just a trait of Expressionism I think, to visually and musically express the inside of its characters; it gives you everything you could ever ask for in order to understand what's going on and who's who. So it's used in "rom-coms" and horror films, and makes the films very popular. While I appreciated it, Impressionism, which I honestly prefer, doesn't do that. It uses exactly what's there and that's it, might not even have music in the whole film; it instead uses social and historical context as well as natural scenery to describe the characters. It's normally used in indie drama films, which are rarely as popular as expressionistic films but normally more critically acclaimed for their realism.

But for once I appreciated expressionism here. Because I totally understood why it was applied. Not just for eye popping kicks, which could almost force you to clutch your cheeks in painful dismay, begging for it to stop. But to show the viewer how alone and increasingly unstable Matsuko became, dwelling into a world of make believe and as she aged, hallucinations. So the fact that the film looked like you just dropped and popped acid kinda goes along with that, as opposed to Amelie which is gratuitously quirky and weird, just for the sake of being so. That being said, I liked Amelie but it had no personal affect on me. It taught me nothing. But how to giggle at an Arab immigrant struggling to pronounce French names, and how to sit through 2 hours of psychedelia.

I hadn't heard of this film till it appeared on television as part of a short season of Asian films. I'm glad that I decided to watch it though as it was a delightful film which made me laugh and cry.

Shou is living alone doing nothing with his life till one day his father comes by and asks him to clear up the house of his aunt Matsuko who had been murdered. Up until then Shou had no knowledge of his aunt but as he sorts through her belongings and meets people who knew her he learns what an extraordinary life she had, some happy but much sad. It is especially sad at the end when we learn how she died after surviving many hardships.

The film has a surreal appearance that reminded me of a cross between Amalie and the TV series Pushing Daisies due to the artificially vivid colours. If you want to see something different I'd certainly recommend this charming film.

The film is about memory as the English title states, this brings it under one of the most vital (and most cinematic) subgroups in cinema, films about our ability to recall life as illusion and mind rather than as just a bunch of surrounding facts. So what kind of recall here?

A vagrant middle-aged woman is discovered dead one day, the kind of nameless death that might make neighbors pause for only a brief moment, and this is the first admission here; ordinary life next door can be the center of a rich world. This is done with a little too much obvious caprice for my taste but the essence is the same, we go back to find this woman when she was a sweet young girl with all of life and heartbreak still ahead of her.

I don't know how much is personal for the filmmaker here but much is revealed by simply examining appearances. A vibrant memory, with a hyperactive consciousness that joyously swims through tragedy. It starts like one of those hyper Japanese TV ads, the filmmaker apparently has plenty of experience in those, but as we progress the whole is mellowed and given resonance behind the popup colors. This is the second admission, that life deserves to be celebrated with as much color.

A preeminent formulator of Noh wrote in the 1400s, Zen inspired, that "life is a lying dream, he only wakes who casts the world aside". There's no such effort here to awaken to what creates suffering and to purify, the film is simply taken in by the swirl and sadness of suffering. I was reminded of the lush Powell/Pressburger melodramas from the 40s as well as recent Julie Taymor with her song and dance. Others thought of Tim Burton. To be sure though the fixation with color and artifice is as recent in Japan as anime but as old as kabuki.

So, overwrought and sentimental melodrama on one side, too much so for my taste. Just the same I appreciate the bubbly air that refuses to dwell on misfortune; it's quickly brushed aside for some new heartbreak to come along. Yet it doesn't address its own question about the meaninglessness of life and it's in this deeper way that the absence of awakening resurfaces. The girl is merely buffeted along by attachment and need and at no point, down to her final moments, comes to a realization.

In the list of hearbreaking films ultimately this deserves its own place next to Capra's Wonderful Life. This is, as much as anything else, because the filmmaker leaves his heroine to a horrible life and meaningless end because in the end she's only the figment of a story that he uses to inspire with but that inspiration and change is never allowed to her inside the story. The bittersweet worldview says, suffer as much as you are able to bear, in the end there is release.

The penultimate scene is possibly one of the twenty best shots I have seen in my life, a flow of consciousness that lifts up from her and races through waters. Marvelous work. This is the cultivated awareness of the illusory life the Japanese have known for centuries across Shinto temples, Zen and the Noh stage.

But the maker ends this a scene late for my taste. The last one revisits the home of childhood as the place from which to ascend, paying homage to the well known stairway scene from A Matter of Life and Death by Powell/Pressburger, which just says too much now as it did then.

Who is Matsuko and what memories are these? Mitsuko was a born optimist, a fervent believer in human goodness. The memories, therefore, are inevitably sad as she discovers the journey along the yellow brick road can be tough haul. We discover Matsuko through her brother's quest when he hears of her death (she left home some fifteen years ago). Porn star, convict, hairdresser - these are all part of a less than glittering cv. This could easily have been an unremitting 2 hours of grimness and probably would have been were this film British. But director Tetsuya Nakashima throws everything into this including the kitchen sink, just as he did with his similarly surreal Kamikaze Girls. The result leaves you reeling as you run the gamut of emotions as the heroine's fate unravels.

It is a real tragicomedy! This film is about cruel facts, but under a musical comedy appearance. It is a movie that made me cry, as if I still were 15 years old. And I cried because what is told in the film can happen... And unfortunately it actually happens everywhere and everyday. It is a film that has made me believe again in the Japanese cinema. In this movie I have seen a Kenji Mizoguchi's spirit revival, because of the way it describes the life of a woman who is mistreated by everybody and whose life is irremediably ruined. Doesn't this story remember Mizoguchi's "Oyu-sama"? I also saw some Akira Kurosawa's influences, like the colorful shanty dwelling Matsuko lives in during the last years of her sad existence: aren't they close to the ones Kurosawa showed in "Dodeskaden"? According to my point of view, this is the best Japanese film of this still young 21st century.