Ever experimenting, ever unpredictable, Keisuke Kinoshita for the first time turns his eye onto real events in Japanese history.
Of the major Japanese film-makers of his era, only Ozu and Naruse dealt with “modern times” more single-mindedly than Kinoshita, so Fuefuki River is a major departure on his part.* It covers more than sixty years during the clan wars of the 16th century, something like the Wars of the Roses in England, that were not ultimately settled until the Tokugawas took control of the Shogunate after 1600. Rather than concentrating on the nobles and the samurai, however, he tells the story of the era through the life of a single peasant family that lives beside the bridge over the Fuefuki, west of Edo and north of Mt. Fuji in a much-contested area during the era.
Over that bridge armies come and go, and the young men of the family run away to join them (or are shanghaied into them), always forgetting that nothing good came when their older relatives did the same. If nothing else, the army offers excitement and a way to get off the subsistence farm, always an attraction for young men throughout history, but in this period it was still conceivable for a commoner to be elevated to samurai rank by performing a conspicuous act of bravery in the field (just as in Europe it was theoretically possible for a common soldier to be knighted).
As might be expected, nothing good comes of each of these excursions. For one thing, the sons have an uncanny knack of picking the wrong side. But part of the point is that they don’t even know which side is which. The wars take place for reasons far above their heads and the great lords are all but invisible and there is no “cause” that anyone can understand.
Unfortunately, because seventy years are jammed into two hours, it is difficult to maintain any emotional connection to the characters, even with Hideko Takamine aging through the family history.
The characters are too briefly developed and too typical to be more than symbols of the general peasantry. The point is made all too obviously that wars are fought purely for the benefit of those at the top, and that the purpose of those below is simply to be fought over and to endure.
Despite the lack of a real emotional connection to a central character, it is a fascinating film to watch. Shot in black and white, it is often tinted like a silent film, producing some of Kinoshita’s most beautiful imagery.
In other scenes, he tints only portions of the image. Sometimes this is a striking effect, sometimes merely distracting, particular when there are what look like watercolor washes which seem to indicate sky, grass, or water then move as the camera moves to cover other parts of the scene.
He does not skip the battle scenes but generally avoids the spectacular in favor of the personal. Often he will freeze the frame or even conduct the fights in a sequence of stills. Despite the repetitiousness of the story line, he never repeats himself in its presentation.
All of this is underscored by a remarkable score by his brother Chuji, built around traditional Japanese instruments and sounds, with a singing commentator like the balladeer in Immortal Love.
Kinoshita often experimented with technical effects that were unusual not just in Japan and they almost always worked to make the film more emotionally effective. Here, the experiments don’t distract (except for the watercolor washes), but they don’t particularly enhance either.
Still, this is a must-see movie for anyone interested in Japanese movies and Japanese culture. It should not continue to lie unnoticed at the bottom of Criterion’s search lists.
* As far as I can determine, Yatsuya kaidan and Ballad of Narayama were his only other period pieces and neither was based upon historical fact. Since he wrote his own scripts, Kinoshita was able to be more independent of studio assignments than most Shochiku directors. Fuefuki, like Narayama, was based on a novel by Shichiro Fukazawa, which may indicate a sense of connection between the two writers; or, the overtly experimental approaches he took in those two films may have been a quiet rebellion against material, particularly period material, that the studio insisted he adapt, which constrained his own writing and forced his imagination into new approaches to presentation. Due to the shortage of serious biographical or critical material on his work, we have no way of knowing what his thought processes may have been.
