Ishiro Honda followed the typical route of a Japanese director in being an assistant director for several years before receiving his first assignment. Most notably, he did second unit work on Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog before Toho gave him his first chief directing job on The Blue Pearl, a small melodramatic love triangle given remarkable quality through its specific focus on a small slice of rural Japanese life and its traditions, helped in no small part by Honda's already well-practiced and quality eye for visual compositions. The Japanese model that was effectively an apprenticeship model seems to have been a good one.
Nishida (Ryo Ikebe) is the new schoolteacher and assistant at the lighthouse in the Ise-Shima region of Japan. He immediately attracts the attention of Noe (Yukiko Shimazaki), the best ama diver in the small village Nishida is now to call home. At the same time, a young woman who had grown up in the village, Riu (Yuriko Hamada), fresh from Tokyo with the clothes and accessories to get the local girls jealous of her new look and the young men slavishly following her and her obvious sexuality. That's a remarkable contrast to the traditional ways that women attracted men in the village: by being the best ama divers. Ama divers wear the largely sexless outfits of impoverished Japanese, but they provide most of the village's income through the finding of abalone.
The titular blue pearl is part of a local legend (most likely invented for the film or source novel by Katsuro Yamada) where a local ama diver was promised to a foreign groom who turned out to be a Dragon God. She died by jumping into a well, and she became incarnate in that pearl that no one has ever seen. As the chief of the lighthouse (Takashi Shimura) explains, it has a central message of keeping the ama divers marrying local men which also helps protect the local economy. This gets mentioned only a few times, but it's part of what gives the film a certain uniqueness. It's extremely tied to the location, down to its culture. It infuses people's actions and reactions to events. It creates a distinct flavor to what is essentially just a rather simple melodrama.
The actual plot follows as Nishida grows to like Noe, Riu rankles at the expectations put on her by the village and her own inability to perform at the same level as the rest of the ama divers, as well as Riu's insistence on just causing pain to the best ama diver, Noe, by stealing her man, an effort that Nishida resists. That plotline, in isolation, is handled well enough. There's the general Japanese layer around modesty and shame that feels like a more generic narrative approach (for Japan). The characters are well written, informed by their backgrounds and living conditions and desires, but what really drives them is the culture around them. And this is where the layers of information the film places onto the action really pays off.
When Riu decides to go off from the normal diving to find the pearl, it makes sense. We know why she does it. We don't need a reminder. We just need a quick line of dialogue about how she's swimming in the direction of the pearl. When Noe makes her final decision, haunted as she is in the end, it also makes perfect sense and provides the final bit of tragedy to the whole thing. It comes together to create this, in the end, surprising sense of tragic beauty around the film's action that, for most of its runtime, was mostly just a run of the mill melodrama in an interesting setting.
I need to note the visuals as well. If this film is famous for anything other than being Honda's first film (it's not famous at all, to be honest), it's because Honda used underwater photography for the first time in a Japanese feature film (he'd done some in a documentary a few years earlier as well). There's a certain Malick-like quality to the underwater photography since it has no natural sound and Honda chooses to heavily use poetic music (by Tadashi Hattori) overlaid on top. It works really well. However, more commonly is this practiced approach to composition that he can't quite manage in the underwater scenes. I had assumed that Kurosawa's ability with composition was unique to him at the time because of his background as a painter, but Honda has similar command in his first feature. Compositions have three-dimensional qualities with strong emphasis on balance. He can move the frame and go from one nice composition to another. He's showing real quality from the beginning regarding the physical qualities of putting together a film.
So, this is a gem, mostly forgotten by the world because to the world, if they think of Honda at all it's about Godzilla. Well, this is the reason I wanted to discover Honda. Not the walking, fire breathing nuclear bomb metaphor, but his command of smaller films and more human emotions. It's nice to see that I'm not disappointed from the very beginning.
