It is 1978 and the middle of a heat wave in Japan. Kikoyo (Mayumi Ogawa) is at her wits end with her three children. Gathering the kids up, they take a train to visit the children's father. Sokichi (Ken Ogata) is running a printing business with is current wife Oume (Shima Iwashita) who has until now had no knowledge of his lover, let alone his brood. No longer able to support Kikoyo and the children, Sokichi has simply cut off contact with them. Now, Kikuyo insists, they are his problem....
For those in the NYC area, a reminder that Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Bright Future opens today at the Cinema Village. Kurosawa's films are hard to see theatrically in the U.S. outside of festivals, so try to catch this one while you can. Kurosawa's films have a mysterious elusive quality to them, none quite as much as Bright Future. Of the five I have seen, this is on the one hand the most straightforward film, but it is also perhaps the hardest to get one's head around. I have been mulling it over in my mind like no other movie this year. The other Kurosawa films I've seen have used thriller/horror genre trappings to allow a point of entry for the viewer. Bright Future, while no less concerned with modern alienation than Cure or Kairo, allows the emotional undercurrents to drive the story more, all while keeping the technique largely the same. It's an odd film, but a rich and rewarding one. Manohla Dargis's review is nicely done, and skillfully skirts the plot spoilers that others have freely spilled....
A Desperate Housewife: Yoshitaro Nomura's Zero Focus
Yoshitaro Nomura's Zero Focus (1961) begins with an ending; not the film's ending, but the end of a relationship, though this is unbeknownst to either partner at the moment. Teiko (Yoshiko Kuga) is at a Tokyo train station seeing off her new husband Kenichi (Koji Nambara) as he leaves to oversee the transfer of his position in an advertising agency to a new hire. He tells his wife that he will be back in a few days. Those days pass quickly for the young woman and as the third day comes and goes, then the fourth and the fifth, she becomes increasingly worried....
