Memories of Matsuko

The film is about memory as the English title states, this brings it under one of the most vital (and most cinematic) subgroups in cinema, films about our ability to recall life as illusion and mind rather than as just a bunch of surrounding facts. So what kind of recall here?

A vagrant middle-aged woman is discovered dead one day, the kind of nameless death that might make neighbors pause for only a brief moment, and this is the first admission here; ordinary life next door can be the center of a rich world. This is done with a little too much obvious caprice for my taste but the essence is the same, we go back to find this woman when she was a sweet young girl with all of life and heartbreak still ahead of her.

I don't know how much is personal for the filmmaker here but much is revealed by simply examining appearances. A vibrant memory, with a hyperactive consciousness that joyously swims through tragedy. It starts like one of those hyper Japanese TV ads, the filmmaker apparently has plenty of experience in those, but as we progress the whole is mellowed and given resonance behind the popup colors. This is the second admission, that life deserves to be celebrated with as much color.

A preeminent formulator of Noh wrote in the 1400s, Zen inspired, that "life is a lying dream, he only wakes who casts the world aside". There's no such effort here to awaken to what creates suffering and to purify, the film is simply taken in by the swirl and sadness of suffering. I was reminded of the lush Powell/Pressburger melodramas from the 40s as well as recent Julie Taymor with her song and dance. Others thought of Tim Burton. To be sure though the fixation with color and artifice is as recent in Japan as anime but as old as kabuki.

So, overwrought and sentimental melodrama on one side, too much so for my taste. Just the same I appreciate the bubbly air that refuses to dwell on misfortune; it's quickly brushed aside for some new heartbreak to come along. Yet it doesn't address its own question about the meaninglessness of life and it's in this deeper way that the absence of awakening resurfaces. The girl is merely buffeted along by attachment and need and at no point, down to her final moments, comes to a realization.

In the list of hearbreaking films ultimately this deserves its own place next to Capra's Wonderful Life. This is, as much as anything else, because the filmmaker leaves his heroine to a horrible life and meaningless end because in the end she's only the figment of a story that he uses to inspire with but that inspiration and change is never allowed to her inside the story. The bittersweet worldview says, suffer as much as you are able to bear, in the end there is release.

The penultimate scene is possibly one of the twenty best shots I have seen in my life, a flow of consciousness that lifts up from her and races through waters. Marvelous work. This is the cultivated awareness of the illusory life the Japanese have known for centuries across Shinto temples, Zen and the Noh stage.

But the maker ends this a scene late for my taste. The last one revisits the home of childhood as the place from which to ascend, paying homage to the well known stairway scene from A Matter of Life and Death by Powell/Pressburger, which just says too much now as it did then.

As a matter of fact, the only film I can remember crying over is the brilliant "Babette's Feast".

"Matsuko" has a quality not unlike "Amelie", but mixed with a "Moulin Rouge" sensibility. It's part "Roger Rabbit" and part "Casablanca" -- never before have I seen stylistic pastiche used with such forethought and precision.

Some will find "Matsuko" sentimental and predictable -- but I think that doesn't matter: It's the storytelling that's important in this film and not, necessarily, the story.

"Matsuko" may not be a "great" film but, like "Babette" and "Amelie," I will want to see it again. I have a feeling that many people will react to the film in a similar fashion.

Who is Matsuko and what memories are these? Mitsuko was a born optimist, a fervent believer in human goodness. The memories, therefore, are inevitably sad as she discovers the journey along the yellow brick road can be tough haul. We discover Matsuko through her brother's quest when he hears of her death (she left home some fifteen years ago). Porn star, convict, hairdresser - these are all part of a less than glittering cv. This could easily have been an unremitting 2 hours of grimness and probably would have been were this film British. But director Tetsuya Nakashima throws everything into this including the kitchen sink, just as he did with his similarly surreal Kamikaze Girls. The result leaves you reeling as you run the gamut of emotions as the heroine's fate unravels.

It is a real tragicomedy! This film is about cruel facts, but under a musical comedy appearance. It is a movie that made me cry, as if I still were 15 years old. And I cried because what is told in the film can happen... And unfortunately it actually happens everywhere and everyday. It is a film that has made me believe again in the Japanese cinema. In this movie I have seen a Kenji Mizoguchi's spirit revival, because of the way it describes the life of a woman who is mistreated by everybody and whose life is irremediably ruined. Doesn't this story remember Mizoguchi's "Oyu-sama"? I also saw some Akira Kurosawa's influences, like the colorful shanty dwelling Matsuko lives in during the last years of her sad existence: aren't they close to the ones Kurosawa showed in "Dodeskaden"? According to my point of view, this is the best Japanese film of this still young 21st century.

I hadn't heard of this film till it appeared on television as part of a short season of Asian films. I'm glad that I decided to watch it though as it was a delightful film which made me laugh and cry.

Shou is living alone doing nothing with his life till one day his father comes by and asks him to clear up the house of his aunt Matsuko who had been murdered. Up until then Shou had no knowledge of his aunt but as he sorts through her belongings and meets people who knew her he learns what an extraordinary life she had, some happy but much sad. It is especially sad at the end when we learn how she died after surviving many hardships.

The film has a surreal appearance that reminded me of a cross between Amalie and the TV series Pushing Daisies due to the artificially vivid colours. If you want to see something different I'd certainly recommend this charming film.