Sada et al.

[Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow]

I've just returned from 12 days in Europe (on university and not 
film-related business) and am now trying to catch up on my mail.

I would like to ask forgiveness to those who tried to contact me in those 
days.  I was in too much of a rush before leaving to properly tell ya'll, 
but I'll try to catch up.

But now that I'm back, I do want to touch on two things:

1) A reminder that the Mizoguchi Symposium at Meigaku is this weekend.

2) With all the _Sada discussion_, here's my short review of the film:

	Sada Abe has always been a mixture of myth and reality. On May 19th, 
1936, the thirty-one-year old housemaid and former prostitute did in fact 
strangle her lover to death and cut off his penis as a "memento" of their 
passionate love. But the minute that crime was discovered, the instant it 
hit the pages of every newspaper in Japan, Sada also became a popular 
myth, an image of "excessive love" or "personal resistance" in a time of 
militarist fanaticism.
	This fascination with Sada the image has led to many movie adaptations 
of her story, the more notable ones, like Nagisa Oshima's Empire of the 
Senses (1976) or Noboru Tanaka's Sada Abe, the True Story (1975), mixing 
political or social commentary with a psychological investigation of 
Sada's passion, looking for the real reasons behind her committing the 
unthinkable.
	Nobuyuki Obayashi's new version of the Sada Abe story, Sada, doesn't 
look like it's about to give us the reality of her life. One could have 
predicted this from the very fact Obayashi was sitting in the director's 
chair. Famed for his cinematic paeans to pure and energetic "shojo" 
(young girls) in such films as Sabinshinbo (1985) and Futari (1991), 
Obayashi seems the director least able to depict the reason's behind such 
an unvirginal and carnal act.
	Sada is best when Obayashi concentrates on Sada the image, less by 
analyzing its historical construction, than by emphasizing the very fact 
it is an image. The film begins with a narrator (Kyusaku Shimada, playing 
Sada's step-brother in the story), standing in front of a 1930s movie 
theater, announcing that the show is about to begin. 
	And what a show we get. A product of the 1960s experimental film world, 
Obayashi pulls practically every device out of his cinematic bag of 
tricks--slow motion, fast motion, switches from black and white to color, 
pixillation, Mickey Mousing, etc.--to give us a bravura motion picture 
medley that seems to underline, "This is only a movie."
	An astute researcher of cinematic technique, Obayashi is at times 
offering us more a historical catalog of motion picture styles than 
Sada's narrative. One scene resembles a Keystone Cop comic chase, another 
a slapstick comedy, and his editing is reminiscent of the 1930s Shochiku 
output. The result is a beautifully shot and composed artifice, in which 
all the acting brims with wondrous theatricality.
	This Sada is a joy for someone like me, a film historian, to watch. But 
there is another part of Sada which makes one wonder why this film was 
ever made.
	Despite its emphasis on the unreal, Sada cannot shed itself of the 
pretense of exposing Sada's "reality." Screenwriter Hiroko Nishizawa's 
thesis is that Sada, when she was in her teens, had a platonic love 
affair with a medical student who, falling victim to leprosy, was later 
forcibly confined and separated from Sada.
	This "fact" gives Obayashi the mold in which to portray Sada as just 
another pure "shojo" (a role Hitomi Kuroki fits well, despite her age), a 
girl defined by that love and not the more carnal affairs thereafter.  It 
allows him to downplay the bloodily unvirginal moment of Sada's act of 
castration in favor of her age of pure innocence, rendering all that is 
subsequent the mere afterglow of that glory.
	Whatever truth we might give to that hypothesis, in Obayashi's hands, it 
comes out less as a real possibility, a new angle on the historical 
figure Sada Abe, than just another element in his cinematic bag of 
tricks. It seems to underline that Obayashi's "shojo" world exists only 
in the movies and no where else, either in the present or the past.
	Sold as a new version of a well-known story, a story of the human heart 
for a jaded age, Sada is so contradictory it fails to give us even that. 
One must ask the producers what had in mind when they decided to make 
this film. And Obayashi, what the point was in doing the Sada Abe story 
if all he was going to do was reduce a real and historically complex 
figure--and the history of her image--to an image as innocent and as 
artificial as all the rest he has concocted.


Aaron Gerow
Yokohama National University
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