Open House (1998/2003*)

Urban life is crowded yet isolated in Open House, where no one's house is open. Tomonori is a nomad in the city, standing in a phone booth in the rain as someone (from the tone of the replies apparently a relative) refuses to let him crash for a few days. Mitsuwa is a model who, …

Girl of Silence / Fazafakka (1995)

There have been many Japanese movies about sex and the teen-aged girl, but few are as disturbing to watch as Girl of Silence. Shizuko is 14 when her mother brings home a new man. She has her first sexual experience with a boy in her school class, and very awkward it is for both of …

Will to Live / Ikitai (1999)

Made in his mid-eighties, Kaneto Shindo's Last Note had taken a look at aging for performing artists, with the last screen appearances of Nobuko Otowa and Haruko Sugimura. Now at age 87, Shindo takes a look at aging portrayed by a man, with Rentaro Mikuni, one of the last of the major postwar male stars …

Burden of Life / Jinsei no onimotsu (1935)

The Burden of Life seems an awfully heavy title for the gentle shomin-geki it accompanies. The family we meet is generally happy. Mother and Father get along well. Two of the sisters are already married and the third is about to be married, while the 9-year-old son is essentially just a typical 9-year-old boy. The …

License to Live / Ningen gokaku (1998)

A young man suddenly wakes from a ten year coma, having skipped from age 14 to 24. In almost any nation's cinema, this would have become a comedy, with jokes built on trying to cope with all the new technology, changed family relationships, the loss of old school friends, and the need to go back …

Jogakusei-ki (1941)

Jogakusei-ki is another of those fascinating and charming movies about nothing that seem to be a specialty of Japan. Generally lumped together under the term shomin-geki, they simply portray the everyday world of everyday people, usually salarymen or small business owners. In this case, we follow a class of high school girls for a semester …

Tree Without Leaves / Deciduous Trees / Rakuyoju (1986)

An old man walks through the snow and hears his mother calling him in to supper on a summer night, beginning a long journey into his childhood memories. Since the old man is a screenwriter now trying to write his first “novel,” we can assume this is an autobiographical film by Kaneto Shindo about his …

Family Game / Kazoku gemu (1983)

The family was the fundamental unit of Japanese society, but by the eighties it was seen by many to have gone adrift. This uneasiness is the subject of The Family Game, a satirical look at the family in the age of the salaryman that is often more revealing than it is funny. From the very …

Preparation for the Festival / Matsuri no junbi (1975)

The story of my first love affair and how I ran away from my small town to become a writer has been a staple of American literature and film since at least Look Homeward, Angel, but it has been something of a rarity in Japanese movies. Kaneto Shindo had made his first movie about his …

Punishment Room / Shokei no heya (1956)

By the end of the fifties, Kon Ichikawa was probably second only to Akira Kurosawa in his international reputation, based on Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain, but it was Punishment Room, made just after Burmese Harp, that cemented his reputation in Japan. Though critics like to place Punishment Room within the context of …