At the beginning of "Memories of Matsuko", Matsuko Kawajiri, the eponymous heroine, is found murdered in a field under mysterious circumstances. She has died alone and estranged from her family. It is the task of her young nephew, Shou, to piece together the details of her extraordinary life, which we witness first hand in the form of vivid flashbacks to Matsuko's past, from wide-eyed childhood to disenchanted middle age. The result is something of a Japanese "Moll Flanders", by turns tragic and comic.
The freedom with which writer-director Tetsuya Nakashima delves between past and present is the film's most satisfying aspect, coupled with a playfully thin boundary between reality and illusion: one moment the film is insistently realistic, with a limited, dark palette, the next it soars into Technicolor dreamscapes full of songs, flowers, butterflies and other recurring motifs. The cinematography is exquisite and endlessly creative. While this is an ultimately tragic biopic with a number of distressing scenes (not least the repeated incidence of domestic abuse), it is equally full of comedy, particularly during Matsuko's youthful stint as a schoolteacher. This freewheeling mixture of presentation and narrative tone will be quite unfamiliar to most English-speaking audiences, and better parallels can be found in French cinema – "Love Me if You Dare", for instance – or closer to Japan in the work of South Korean Chan-wook Park. At points "Memories of Matsuko" certainly recalls films like "I'm An Android, But That's OK" and the superb "Oldboy". After all, is anyone's life truly sad *or* happy? Our lives are full of joy and pain, elation and tragedy, and in that Matsuko's is little different.
Yet Nakashima's visual fireworks are both a blessing and a curse. All too often the montages and singing substitute for proper characterisation and dialogue. At a number of points his cinematic shorthand leaves much to be desired: Matsuko's lengthy jail term, for instance, in which she is supposed to have formed a close friendship with Megumi, is reduced merely to a two-minute music video. Similarly, while Matsuko has various lovers whom she clings to, not once does she share a meaningful conversation with them. Nakashima seems to relish in depicting the dramatic, violent conclusions to these relationships, but the more prosaic task of day-to-day interaction – the real, quotidian essence of life – is almost entirely overlooked. Many of the characters populating the movies's vibrant surface feel two-dimensional, and Nakashima's screenplay shows less interest in taking the time to flesh them out, than it does in jumping forward to the next episode of Matsuko's life.
For this reason I found it difficult to really identify with Matsuko and her world by the end, and I was left with a series of stunning vignettes that did not combine into a memorable, convincing whole. The last 10 minutes, indeed, are something of an embarrassment for Nakashima. His screenplay loses all sense of emotional verisimilitude and descends into an overblown, saccharine festival of nostalgia and string-sections which embodies the worst excesses of Japanese cinema. Its simplistic, quasi-religious moralizing is tacky and hollow: Matsuko's character and story really deserved a more complex ending, and certainly something more befitting of the movie's underlying uncertainty. The simple fact of her terrible murder in itself, which is almost unbearably realistic and difficult to watch, would perhaps have been the best place to fade-out.
The freedom with which writer-director Tetsuya Nakashima delves between past and present is the film's most satisfying aspect, coupled with a playfully thin boundary between reality and illusion: one moment the film is insistently realistic, with a limited, dark palette, the next it soars into Technicolor dreamscapes full of songs, flowers, butterflies and other recurring motifs. The cinematography is exquisite and endlessly creative. While this is an ultimately tragic biopic with a number of distressing scenes (not least the repeated incidence of domestic abuse), it is equally full of comedy, particularly during Matsuko's youthful stint as a schoolteacher. This freewheeling mixture of presentation and narrative tone will be quite unfamiliar to most English-speaking audiences, and better parallels can be found in French cinema – "Love Me if You Dare", for instance – or closer to Japan in the work of South Korean Chan-wook Park. At points "Memories of Matsuko" certainly recalls films like "I'm An Android, But That's OK" and the superb "Oldboy". After all, is anyone's life truly sad *or* happy? Our lives are full of joy and pain, elation and tragedy, and in that Matsuko's is little different.
Yet Nakashima's visual fireworks are both a blessing and a curse. All too often the montages and singing substitute for proper characterisation and dialogue. At a number of points his cinematic shorthand leaves much to be desired: Matsuko's lengthy jail term, for instance, in which she is supposed to have formed a close friendship with Megumi, is reduced merely to a two-minute music video. Similarly, while Matsuko has various lovers whom she clings to, not once does she share a meaningful conversation with them. Nakashima seems to relish in depicting the dramatic, violent conclusions to these relationships, but the more prosaic task of day-to-day interaction – the real, quotidian essence of life – is almost entirely overlooked. Many of the characters populating the movies's vibrant surface feel two-dimensional, and Nakashima's screenplay shows less interest in taking the time to flesh them out, than it does in jumping forward to the next episode of Matsuko's life.
For this reason I found it difficult to really identify with Matsuko and her world by the end, and I was left with a series of stunning vignettes that did not combine into a memorable, convincing whole. The last 10 minutes, indeed, are something of an embarrassment for Nakashima. His screenplay loses all sense of emotional verisimilitude and descends into an overblown, saccharine festival of nostalgia and string-sections which embodies the worst excesses of Japanese cinema. Its simplistic, quasi-religious moralizing is tacky and hollow: Matsuko's character and story really deserved a more complex ending, and certainly something more befitting of the movie's underlying uncertainty. The simple fact of her terrible murder in itself, which is almost unbearably realistic and difficult to watch, would perhaps have been the best place to fade-out.