[KineJapan] Yamada Yji’s Chiisai ouchi

[Cook, Theodore]

Roger,

This is a fascinating and detail rich  report that reflects exactly how I find myself watching movies with war themes. Thank you! I was also interested in the reference to Gonin no sekkōhei .

Ted

Sent from my iPhone

On Feb 15, 2014, at 8:21 AM, "Roger Macy" <macyroger at yahoo.co.uk<mailto:macyroger at yahoo.co.uk>> wrote:

Dear KineJapaners,
A few early thoughts on Yamada Yōji’s new Chiisai ouchi that premiered here in Berlin last night, for anyone who is interested.
‘The Little House’ - seems to go out of its way to avoid adverse criticism and, arguably, too far.  It has a flash-back structure that starts with the funeral of a grand aunt in Yamagata-prefecture, flashing back to her being encouraged to write her war-time story by a grand nephew, flashing back again to the war-time story itself. But there is a coda where we flash forward, after the funeral and the rediscovery of the story, to this same nephew’s subsequent hunt for survivors of her story.
The story comes from the prize-winning novel of 2010 by Nakajima Kyōko.  I do not know how the story unfolds in that book. The intermediate flash-back allows the script-writers, Yamada and frequent collaborator Hiramatsu Eriko, to filter the language.  One particular problem of stories from this period - and not just of Japanese films - is that if the terminology for describing the war is historically authentic, then certain attitudes and positions could be imported without critical judgement, and it is clear that the authors wish to avoid this, even when this filtering device gets in the way of a crisp story.  Grand aunt, who presumably has had little use for her schooling in eighty years, has her young relative as an analogue spell-checker, which places him to say such things as “You’re not telling the truth - Tokyo couldn’t have been at peace in 1936, five years after the start of the ‘Fifteen years’ war’ and in the year of the attempted coup.”  This allows grand aunt to affirm the life she experienced in service to a middle-class family of that time.  ‘Fifteen years’ war’ is hardly an uncontested term for that period, even by a 2000s student, but the rhetorical device allows a certain distance from the language to be established.  In other cases I think the writers gloss over the language and propaganda.  For example, if a 1943 character were to criticise the eating of delicacies, I don’t think that they would refer to the “starving soldiers in New Guinea” because I’m sure that information would not have been broadcast.
I would like to have said definitely that the film explains too much that people would know about the war-time era but, alas, Yamada may be right that he needs to start near the beginning.  A screening here of Gonin no sekkōhei / Five Scouts got patriotic noises of approval from some of the audience that upset others.  In contrast, Yamada has gone out of his way in an interview in the Hollywood Reporter to criticise the current drift of Japanese foreign policy.
The film, for a prime Saturday night slot at the Berlinale, looked decidedly low budget.  The only street scene I recall was stock film.  There simply wasn’t enough dirt, or wear on these fine, war-time clothes, which looked like they had to go back to the hire-company totally unblemished.  A little weathering of the digital red roof of the house wouldn’t have broken the bank.  Although I couldn’t relate the interior sets to the digital exterior, neither seemed very little, to me.  The careful showing of a copy of Japanese ‘Gone With the Wind’ did not, in the end, lead me anywhere.  We get a brief modelling of Tokyo fire-bombing but no mention of fire-storms.
There was a point where the writers seemed to have set up two interesting and interlocking love-triangles of crossed gender but the tide abated with most feelings still well damned up, or at least, unrevealed.  This should have an opportunity for a Berlin audience to relate to a tale of city-dwellers sleep-walking to their destruction but I thought the reception was muted.
Roger

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