JAPANESE FILM FESTIVAL: Norihiro Koizumi’s Flowers examines the dilemmas and problems of marriage and motherhood for women living in Japan over three generations, starting in the 1930s and ending somewhere around the present day.
The introduction, which cuts between six different women in differing situations and timelines, is a (presumably deliberately) confusing sequence that signals from the outset that this narrative is not going to be straight-forward.
Each of the six women – who will turn out to be directly related as mothers, sisters or daughters – is played by one of Japan’s best-known actresses (Yu Aoi, Yuko Takeuchi, Rena Tanaka, Yukie Nakama, Kyoka Suzuki and Ryoko Hirosue). This will give Japanese audiences and specialists in the nation’s contemporary cinema an advantage in disentangling the various plot lines as they flash forward and backward between the women in different timelines.
The first sequence is clear enough. Set in 1936, it’s filmed as a kind of pastiche of Yasujiro Ozu’s classic family dramas – black and white, the static camera near floor level – and tells a brief story of Rin, a teenage girl whose bullying, authoritarian father tells her he has decided to set her up in an arranged marriage. The girl, despite her initially meek appearance, proves made of sterner stuff and decides to run away.
From here we flash forward to the modern day, filmed in colour and lashings of torrential rain, where a young female concert pianist learns her grandma has just died. The deceased turns out to be Rin, the girl from the first sequence.
Another flashback, again in colour, takes us to July 1969 to meet her mother, Midori, introduced as a young woman knocking back a marriage proposal from a nerdy office colleague. This is filmed in the style of the comedies of the period, with jaunty orchestral accompaniment. (Note: this is not to say that it’s funny.) We also meet her two sisters, one of them a widower recovering from the death of her husband in what seems to have been an idyllic marriage – cue long flashback within a flashback. Further time and character shifts occur right through until the end, not all of them easy to follow.
Though the filming style differs slightly throughout, the overall tone is gentle bordering on the somnolent. This makes the bluntness of the film’s apparent gender politics seem weirdly inappropriate. (Lines such as 'I decided to be a strong woman instead of pretending" will seem especially clumsy for anyone who has lapped up the subtle feminism of the TV series Mad Men, set in the US of the early 1960s.) And without giving too much away, the finale – which completes the 1936 introductory sequence – is galling in the light of the film’s earlier gestures of solidarity with female independence.
In depicting these lives with what he no doubt intends to be seen as sensitivity, director Norihiro Koizumi drains the film of energy and life, smothering it with the kind of wan 'good taste’ that made this viewer long for a sprinkling of good old vulgarity – just to liven things up.
