Immortal Love / Bitter Spirit / Eien no hito (1961)

In Immortal Love, Keisuke Kinoshita once again uses Hideko Takamine,* as in Twenty-Four Eyes, as a mirror of Japan’s recent history. But here, the damage done by Japan’s feudal social structure and the war is much more personalized. The young teacher of Twenty-Four Eyes is more an observer than a participant in her story. Here, Takamine’s character becomes the subject herself in what is one of Kinoshita’s most passionate films and one of the great josei-eiga, on a par with Naruse’s Floating Clouds and When a Woman Ascends the Stairs,  both not coincidentally also starring Takamine.

Fundamentally, Immortal Love is something of a deceptive title, for it is a movie about a marriage without love; a better title might have been Immortal Hatred. Takamine is forced into a marriage with Tatsuya Nakadai, whom she hates, and with very good reason. Told in five chapters, the movie begins in 1932, when Nakadai returns from the Manchurian war permanently crippled. He is the son of the local landlord and is used to getting his way in the little village. He decides he wants Takamine, in part because she is the prettiest girl in the village but also because she is in love with Keiji Sada, the village boy who, though poor, was always best at everything and is even now still in the army earning glory. When Takamine is not interested, Nakadai rapes her. When she becomes pregnant, she tries to drown herself, but is rescued by her father. Nakadai has another point of pressure, and his father raises the rent for Takamine’s father, so that in effect she is traded for the farm.

To say the least, she does not come to love him after they are married, nor can she find any love for her first-born son. Sada returns covered in glory, but leaves the village completely when he finds out about Takamine’s past. We next hear of him in Chapter 2, beginning in 1944, when his wife (Nobuko Otawa) appears in the village to live after he is recalled to the army. He is stationed near Hiroshima and develops a lingering disease. But even that marriage is damaged, for Otawa is all too well aware that he has never gotten over his love for Takamine, and further damaged when Nakadai rapes her as well.

Chapter 3 is 1949, when Sada has returned to his family farm without Otowa, where his son becomes friends with Takamine’s later children, but her first son, no longer able to stand the miserable nature of their family life, kills himself in the same stream where Takamine tried. Chapter 4 is 1960 and centers on a visit from the remaining son, in college and now on the run from the police for his communist activities and participation in the protests/riots against the American treaty. Chapter 5 takes us to 1961, when Takamine’s daughter has run away with Sada’s son and now returns to visit him on his deathbed with their child. The core of this chapter is a long dissection of their marriage by Takamine and Nakadai, conducted in the quietest of Japanese tones but brutal nonetheless.

I’ve gone into the plot in some detail to note how Takamine’s family situation in a village far in the boondocks overlaps with and is driven by recent Japanese political history. Those wishing to write class papers can immediately note how Nakadai, the representative of the old samurai class, is not only crippled but has his sense of ethics totally destroyed by the war, even from the beginning when the Japanese were winning.  And of course the Hiroshima references and the student communist will be obvious to everyone.

Watching that great open face of Takamine close down is one of the great horrors of Japanese cinema. Where in the two Naruse films I mentioned earlier she was an open book, so to speak, here she shuts the volume. Over time, there is no hint of the sensitive woman beset by the world or by love. Instead, she shuts out the world, including her own children.

Kinoshita films much of the movie near Mt. Aso, about as far from Tokyo as he could go and not be in Okinawa. This provides us with some unfamiliar scenery, especially the dramatic waterfall where the suicides are staged, but also underlines how far the community is from “modernization.” The men wear western clothes and the train can reach them, but it is a medieval world with nowhere for Takamine to go. Her father can not take her back for he is utterly dependent on Nakadai for his land. Only in 1961 can she really threaten to leave, to go live with her married daughter.

Nakadai and Sada age with make-up, but as far as I can tell, Takamine does it by will power alone, yet is just as convincing, if not more so, while moving from late teens to late forties.

Chuji Kinoshita has provided one of the most unusual soundtracks in all of Japanese film, the score consisting of flamenco guitar and castanets. The very idea seems absurd, but the effect is never distracting and often quite powerful, with some scenes (such as the search for Takamine in her attempted suicide) accompanied only by castanets that add remarkably to the tension. In the bridges between chapters, a singer in the flamenco manner (though singing in Japanese) provides passionate commentary.

At times, Kinoshita seems to be channeling Mizoguchi with long takes and travelling shots and the devastating 1960 conversation between Nakadai and Takamine conducted almost completely in long shot. At other times, he seems like Kurosawa in his energy, tight cutting, and dramatic use of landscape. It is a movie utterly devoid of the sentimentality with which Kinoshita is often charged. Even the ending when Takamine calls Nakadai “Anata” for the first and only time, which could have led to a swelling of tears and heavenly choruses, here is almost unnoticed, so underplayed is the scene and photographed from the side to avoid Takamine’s expressive eyes.

This is a remarkable picture.

• * Though Takamine is most often associated with Naruse’s films at his peak, she also showed up regularly in some of Kinoshita’s best work: In addition to this film, there are Carmen Comes Home, Twenty-four Eyes, Tattered Wings,  Danger Stalks Near, Times of Joy and Sorrow, and The River Fuefuki.