[KineJapan] Yamada Yōji’s Chiisai ouchi

[Roger Macy]

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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