***/****
starring Keiko Kishi, Yoshiko Sakuma, Sayuri Yoshinaga, Yuko Kotegawa
screenplay by Kon Ichikawa, based on the novel by Junichiro Tanizaki
directed by Kon Ichikawa
by Angelo Muredda "So
many things have happened in this house," middle child Sachiko (Yoshiko
Sakuma) tells her older sister Tsuruko (Keiko Kishi) near the end of The Makioka Sisters, an expansive period piece in miniature that could be churlishly
described as a film about the sorts of mundane things that happen in houses. In
settling down to adapt Junichiro Tanizaki's 500-page tome about prewar Japan in
a state of profound social and economic transition, glimpsed only through the
intersecting marital and financial crises of the titular siblings, writer-director Kon Ichikawa
inherited a difficult task, best appreciated by pausing to consider that there's
no English equivalent of George Eliot's Middlemarch (though Sam Mendes keeps trying). If historical
epics are hard to translate to a medium that doesn't allow for marginal notes
and flow charts to keep track of the minor players, the cloistered setting of
domestic ones are doubly tricky. Consider that Joe Wright's recent and thoroughly
rotten stab at Anna Karenina adapts the first part of the novel as a
self-reflexive essay about how difficult it is to dramatize tragedies that take
place in drawing rooms, and the rest as an utterly banal dramatization of a
tragedy set in drawing rooms. Ichikawa's solution, after his own flirtation
with hyper-theatricality in the first reel (which unveils the ensemble in a
series of spatially disconcerting close-ups, then medium shots establishing the siblings' relatives ages), is largely to mine the charismatic reserves of
his all-star cast.
The first line, uttered by
Sachiko in one of those alienating close-ups, is "Money?"–and no
wonder: It's 1938, mid-Depression and on the verge of both modernity and war,
and the Makioka sisters are in a tough place. The patriarch has died, the
family kimono business has been sold, and the two youngest sisters, Yukiko
(Sayuri Yoshinaga) and Taeko (Yuko Kotegawa), remain unmarried, with the former's
best-before date near reached. The more naturally Westernized Taeko has the
better prospects, including a sweet lug of an amateur photographer, but
tradition dictates she can't marry before her older sister. That puts the
burden of ensuring the family's survival through this trying time on the older
pair, who set Yukiko up on a series of feeler dates with possible spouses, such
as a widowed fishery owner who offers his diploma and deceased wife's death
certificate across the table when they meet, in the interest of full
disclosure.
There's a light touch to
how Ichikawa portrays the mechanics of the sisters' courtships, as well as their
almost political dealings with one another. He has a knack for social
shorthand, delicately capturing the way that power is instantiated and upheld within
rigidly-defined families: The elder sisters' husbands, working-class men who
married into the family and took their wives' names, are an intriguing study,
deferent to their higher-class spouses while flouting their trace of masculine
authority whenever the opportunity presents itself. Koji Ishizaka is especially
fun to watch as the gentler Sachiko's doddering husband, whose aesthetic and
borderline-religious obsession with Yukiko prefigures the besotted
beta male Michael Caine played in Hannah and Her Sisters.
But ultimately, it's the
women's show, and, as nice as both the men and Ichikawa's more outré touches
might be, it's the sisters who make this sprawling family drama as compelling
as it is. (These include a surreal family visit to the cherry blossoms–staged
early and recreated even more sublimely towards the end–that would not be out
of place on "Twin Peaks", out-of-time synths and all.) Sakuma
especially is terrific, navigating the soap operatics with grace, though Yoshinaga
has the harder part, registering her awareness and forbidden appreciation of
Ishizaka's un-brotherly love entirely with her eyes.
The Makioka Sisters screens at TIFF Bell Lightbox on January 27, as part of TIFF
Cinematheque's programme "Japanese Divas: The Great
Actresses of Japanese Cinema's Golden Age," running from January 24 to March 31.
