Les Fleurs tombées

Original title: Hana chirinu

1938
1h 14m

IMDb RATING

YOUR RATING

FALLEN BLOSSOMS follows the inhabitants of a Kyoto geisha house as the civil war of the Meiji Restoration rages just outside their walls. Set completely inside the house, only female charact... Read allFALLEN BLOSSOMS follows the inhabitants of a Kyoto geisha house as the civil war of the Meiji Restoration rages just outside their walls. Set completely inside the house, only female characters are seen on screen. AKA: FLOWERS HAVE FALLEN.FALLEN BLOSSOMS follows the inhabitants of a Kyoto geisha house as the civil war of the Meiji Restoration rages just outside their walls. Set completely inside the house, only female characters are seen on screen. AKA: FLOWERS HAVE FALLEN.

See production info at IMDbPro

IMDb RATING

7.2/10

YOUR RATING

See production info at IMDbPro

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User reviews2

7.279

Featured reviews

8richardchatten

Distant Thunder

Described by Noel Burch as "one of the most remarkable community portraits ever filmed", this powerful debut feature made with glacial but passionate elegance by a director still almost unknown in the West would certainly fail the Bechtel Test - despite having an all-female cast - since men are the film's defining absence; a rumbling offscreen presence like the gunfire heard in the closing sequence which combines expressive use both of the camera and the soundtrack.

8boblipton

Women Must Weep

It's the time of the Civil War that surrounded the Meiji reestablishment of the Emperor's power. We don't see any of the men being killed. Instead, the entire movie takes place in a Kyoto geisha house. There are no customers. Troops in the street keep the customers away. The women discuss the events and talk about fleeing for safety.

It's certainly a different view of the chaos of civil war. There are no heroics, no sign of anything except the lack of business, and occasional noises of battle. In fact, there are no men seen, although a few can be heard offscreen. Besides worrying about business, the women talk about men constantly: their customers, their lovers, their relatives, the refugees and soldiers camped just out of town.

Because of its limited setting, director Tamizo Ishida and cameraman Harumi Machii keep this visually interesting by their geat variety of camera angles. In more than 300 set-ups, I didn't see one repeated placement.

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Trivia
According to film theorist Noël Burch, this obscure prewar film is distinctive for three reasons: 1) the cast consists entirely of women: the only males in the world of the film exist only as offscreen voices; 2) the narrative is set entirely in a teahouse in the Gion quarter of Kyoto during two days in July 1864, just a few years before the fall of the shogunate, which ended the rule of the samurai class; and 3) with only a handful of exceptions, no two shots, in the over 350 total shots that comprise the film, are taken from an identical angle and distance. Thus each shot is a unique and unrepeated "set up," a procedure which, because of its difficulty, is unheard-of in Hollywood and elsewhere, even to the present day.