Yoshishige Yoshida

The setting is postwar Japan in this standard melodrama from director Yoshishige Yoshida. Shinko (Mariko Okada) is a young teen living in Akitsu when she meets Shusaku (Hiroyuki Nagato). He is a student who comes to Akitsu just before the end of the war to try to regain his health, and Shinko helps take care of him. The couple fall in love, but when they both hear that Japan has surrendered, they attempt suicide together and fail. The two lovers separate as Shusaku leaves town in the aftermath of their failed attempt, then fate tragically intervenes nearly two decades later.Read More »

One of the leading lights of the Japanese New Wave, Kiju Yoshida (Eros + Massacre) broke with studio filmmaking for A Story Written With Water, his first independent production and the start of his signature style. Telling the story of a man torn between his fiancee and the familial bond of his mother, Yoshida creates a dazzling narrative that uses flashbacks to tell its story of obsession and desire. With the luminous Mariko Okada as the mother, the celebrated star of such masterpieces as Floating Clouds and Late Autumn, she would become Yoshida’s muse across a series of the director’s ‘anti-melodramas’. Yoshida’s singular visual flair and revolutionary exploration of film codes place him as one of the finest Japanese filmmakers of the postwar period.Read More »

For his latest film, Yoshida turned once more to melodrama as a means of sensitively engaging a difficult political issue, here the devastating legacy of the Hiroshima bombing. Mariko Okada stars, in her 154th film, as the eldest of three women trying to uncover the hidden family ties that may or may not bind them together. A shared memory of the Hiroshima disaster draws the three generations together in a search back to the very site of the atomic trauma that unites them, with Hiroshima standing in as a figure for the limit point of the national imagination. Among Yoshida’s more classical films, Women in the Mirror is an assuredly stylish late work that carefully balances the three women’s stories as interlocking pieces of a complex psychological and historiographic puzzle.Read More »

Synopsis:
Yoshida returned to feature filmmaking after a hiatus of thirteen years with this brave and moving film about the struggle to maintain dignity in the face of old age and approaching death. The Human Promise reaffirms Yoshida’s ability to deal with difficult and even taboo topics by exploring the question of euthanasia with a profound sensitivity and subtlety. The film’s unusually frank meditation on death is anchored by the restrained performances by its veteran actors, including Rentaro Mikni, who starred in several of Yoshida’s earlier works, including A Story Written on Water. The Human Promise’s use of water imagery enriches a motif central to the rich ambiguity at the heart of Yoshida’s cinema.Read More »

Quote:
Until 1973 Kijû Yoshida had made sixteen feature films in thirteen years. Having just completed his trilogy on Japanese history “Eros + Massacre” (1969), “Heroic Purgatory” (1970) and “Coup d’Etat” (1971) in which he achieves the form of artistic independence he was striving for and creates his own radical visual and narrative style, the stress of fundraising, producing, writing and directing at the same time takes its toll on him. Yoshida breaks down and falls seriously ill. He has to undergo surgery, but recovers only slowly. In this situation Yoshida receives and accepts the offer of a Japanese TV channel to produce a documentary series on art entitled “The Beauty of Beauty”, which will be broadcasted every Saturday night on Channel 12 from 1974 to 1978. Yoshida left Japan in the fall of 1973 for Europe and works on this series for the next four years producing 94 episodes in total, a project of a truly monumental scale, which can only be compared to the television work of Rossellini after he abandoned cinema.Read More »

Synopsis:
The film’s narrative follows three leading actresses, all appearing in the same movie (but not appearing in the same shot until the end of the film), and all undergoing their own personal crises. It’s very formally worked out, through a series of carefully balanced dialogues with confessors, synchronized confrontation scenes, and staggered flashbacks. If Farewell was Yoshida’s self-conscious Resnais tribute, this is him in Bergman mode (Mariko Okada’s story even begins with her experience hysterical mutism, à la Persona), though the finished product is much livelier and more pungent than anything Bergman would have come up with (maybe Zetterling’s The Girls is a more apposite reference point). On another level, it’s also referencing a big old Hollywood melodrama, pastel panoramas in various shades of bitch (there are also nods to All About Eve).Read More »

Beautiful young Oriko (Mariko Okada) has an unhappy marriage. Her husband Takashi (Tadahiko Sugano), owner of a securities company, has been having an affair and comes home only once in a week at most. In a poetry party, Oriko meets sculptor Mitsuharu (Isao Kimura), who was one of the lovers of Oriko’s deceased poetess mother…Read More »

Quote:
‘Escape from Japan’ chronicles the misadventures of Tatsuo Ihara, a small-time criminal who dreams of seeking his fortune away from Japan. Timed to coincide with the Tokyo Olympiad and released on July 4, Escape From Japan can be safely assumed to have something to say about Japan’s place in the world and its relations with the U.S. in particular. It also proves less an imitation than a black-comic send-up of the sort of sordid crime stories that Seijun Suzuki and others specialized in.Read More »

Plot: An ambitious department store worker endeavors to improve his station in life
by manipulating women to get what he wants – money that is.Read More »