JAPANESE FILM FESTIVAL: Directed by veteran filmmaker Hideyuki Hirayama, Shin-san is a chaste romantic tale, a film where the bonds of friendship are strong but affairs of the heart are forever stymied. As with an earlier generation of Hollywood movies, love happens at a pensive distance, acknowledged but never quite acted upon in a story that reaches over two decades and eventually finds redemption in loss.
Beginning in 1963, as the recently separated seamstress Michiyo (Koyuki) and her young son, Mamoru, return to her family’s island home from Tokyo as the neighbours gossip, the film presents a casual but accumulative vision of domestic Japanese life, with the town based a tightly bound cluster of homes lived in by employees of the island’s coal miner, Kinyima Mining Company. Ragtag bands of children play after school, communal facilities are used and traditional festivals are observed – it could be idyllic, except that the mine is fading, so retrenchments loom with the ever present threat of an accident in the labyrinthine tunnels.
When the bookish Mamoru is defended from bullies by the community’s budding black sheep, Shin-san, the two boys become friends, with the latter finding the maternal comfort absent with the death of his parents and the harsh treatment of his extended family. (A beating from an uncle ruptures the nostalgic vision at one point.) Michiyo’s affection imprints on Shin-san, and those first hugs turn him into an ardent admirer, an idea that outlasts the flashes of industrial trouble and schoolyard experiences. (Not to mention a character with black lung, which is required by law whenever a period piece has a coal mine as a setting.)
First heard in a fervent narration that addresses Shin-san, the teenage Mamoru (Sosuke Ikematsu) is seen when the story leaps ahead and he’s studying on the mainland, alongside Shin-san’s younger sister Miyo, while the fiercely defiant Shin-san is down the mines, diligently providing for as many of his immediate family as possible. The striking Koyuki, however, merely ties her hair back to signify the passing of those years, and Shin-san’s attraction to her doesn’t quite appear to have the social stigma the characters subscribe to it; Miyo claims there must be 20 years between them, but that doesn’t fly when they’re in a shot together.
'My dear foolish boy," Michiyo says to Shin-san, having bestowed a new jacket on him, and in their shared gaze is one of the moments where the movie can’t decide if the attraction is mutual or whether Shin-san has a grand obsession. The younger Michiyo is certainly flighty, often recalling her own teenage years, but as a woman approaching middle age there’s no sense of time passed or a yearning to recapture her youth in Koyuki’s performance.
The high school students have a touch of teenage soap to their adolescent lives, but Hirayama is adept at studding the milieu with wry touches, such as the perpetually pregnant mother whose amount of children keeps extending to larger team sports, and he draws strong supporting efforts from minor players, particularly the older members of Shin-san’s family, who live in the shadow of the industry that has cruelly taken multiple generations of their family while supporting them. It’s an exercise in melodrama, lovingly made, but occasionally a moment strikes deeper – 'we must brand it on our eyes," is the movie’s final line, spoken as the ferry pulls away from the island for the final time.
