The Girl I Loved

Two lovers committed suicide by jumping to their deaths in Japan's cattle country. Chieko Higashiyama adopted the baby girl they left behind, raising her as the sister of her son. A the main body of the movie starts, the girl has grown into Kuniko Igawa and the son into Yasumi Hara. They each have a secret to tell each other, so they agree to reveal them at the moon festival in five days. She tells her secret first: while Hara was away in the war, she fell in love with evacuated and battle-crippled Junji Soneda. She wants the blessing of her brother and mother. So he doesn't tell her his secret: he loves her and wishes them to be married.

It's a simple story of how families sacrifice for each other and are glad for it. For his first effort as writer-director, Keisuke Kinoshita was playing it safe, relying on his actors, his usual cameraman, Hiroshi Kusuda, his own brother to write the music, and the gorgeous scenery of the mountains. It's a slight effort, compared to the movies he would turn out over the next forty years, but well done.

The Girl I Loved is a romantic drama made just a year after the end of World War II. I'm tempted to call it a Japanese western. It is set on a ranch in the countryside and you see lots of cattle herding, horse riding, harmonica playing and even hats that look like sombreros. The plot is very simple: A man falls in love with a woman who has been brought up as his adopted sister. The story is very simple and is almost beside the point in a movie like this. The film's real pleasures come from its cinematography, location shooting and its use of music. The characters keep commenting on how beautiful the area is and they are right: it's easy to imagine giving up everything and moving to such a place. Of course, the movie is a bucolic fantasy; real life in a place like that was probably much harsher. But it's a beautiful fantasy and a very agreeable place to spend an hour and fifteen minutes.

"It's great to be alive. I feel this way about it: only people who've been near to death can appreciate how precious it is to be alive. And also, those who understand how precious it is will not live life mindlessly."

Such a sweet little film from Keisuke Kinoshita. It's got a radiant leading lady (Kuniko Igawa), beautiful pastoral cinematography, and touching post-war sentiments expressed through a simple love triangle. It's a little saccharine when viewed today, but must have felt like a salve of sorts to 1946 Japan, expressing as it does the need for acceptance of those wounded by the war, the virtues of self-sacrifice, and appreciating life despite its disappointments.

The film offers an interesting glimpse into another time and place, where the culture permitted a boy who had grown up with an adopted sister to consider marrying her, and no one is the least conflicted by it. The story isn't very fleshed out relative to its darker aspects, e.g. Why the mother committed suicide, what life was like when the young man went off to war, etc, but the latter may have been touchy during the American occupation, and I suppose they weren't the point anyway. The scene at the festival when his emotions swell, fireworks blasting away in the sky, is a fine one. Towards the end the film gets a little drawn out after the resolution has been made clear, but there's a lot to like about this one.