Tetsuya Nakashima’s MEMORIES OF MATSUKO concludes Japan Society series focusing on the history of the Japanese musical
MEMORIES OF MATSUKO (Tetsuya Nakashima, 2006)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Saturday, April 23, 7:00
Festival runs through April 23
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org
We called Tetsuya Nakashima’s 2004 hit, Kamikaze Girls, the “otaku version of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie,” referring to it as “fresh,” “frenetic,” “fast-paced,” and “very funny.” His feature-length follow-up, the stunningly gorgeous Memories of Matsuko, also recalls Amelie and all those other adjectives, albeit with much more sadness. Miki Nakatani (Ring, Silk) stars as Matsuko, a sweet woman who spent her life just looking to be loved but instead found nothing but heartbreak, deception, and physical and emotional abuse. But Memories of Matsuko, is not a depressing melodrama, even if Nakashima (Confessions, The World of Kanako) incorporates touches of Douglas Sirk every now and again. The film is drenched in glorious Technicolor, often breaking out into bright and cheerful musical numbers straight out of a 1950s fantasy world. As the movie begins, Matsuko has been found murdered, and her long-estranged brother (Akira Emoto) has sent his son, Sho (Eita), who never knew she existed, to clean out her apartment. As Sho goes through the mess she left behind, the film flashes back to critical moments in Matsuko’s life — and he also meets some crazy characters in the present. It’s difficult rooting for the endearing Matsuko knowing what becomes of her, but Nakashima’s remarkable visual style will grab you and never let go. And like Audrey Tatou in Amelie, Nakatani — who won a host of Japanese acting awards for her outstanding performance — is just a marvel to watch. Memories of Matsuko is a fine choice to conclude Japan Society’s rather eclectic 2016 Globus Film Series “Japan Sings! The Japanese Musical Film.” As curator Michael Raine notes, “The ubiquity of music and song in postwar Japanese cinema became an anti-naturalist resource for modernist filmmakers to characterize social groups (Twilight Saloon, A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Songs), or to tweak contemporary debates in avant-garde music by combining Buddhist chant and naniwabushi with West Side Story (Oh, Bomb!). We can hear echoes of that irony even in more recent musical films (The Happiness of the Katakuris, Memories of Matsuko), in which the utopian musical numbers only accentuate the bleakness of the lives they comment on. Seeing and hearing the tradition of musical films in Japanese cinema gives us a different view of Japanese popular culture that is smart as well as silly and sometimes devastating, too.”