By Bryan Hartzheim
Moulin Rouge meets Amelie -- this is not a compliment
Matsuko Kawajiri, played by the always solid and sexy Miki Nakatani, is introduced to us lying on the grass of a park like a beached whale --bloated, disheveled, and brutally beaten to death. Her pathetic corpse, highlighted by buzzing flies, signals initially the life of any one of countless, forgettable vagrants. But why would anyone take the trouble of murdering such a pathetic creature? A few inspectors are assigned to the case of finding her missing killer, but the detective story is more of the trigger than the pulse in Tetsuya Nakashima's Memories of Matsuko (Kiraware Matsuko no Ishhou). The death of Matsuko seems to be merely a narrative device placed to introduce Matsuko's cousin, Shou, into the story as a investigator and instigator of the plot: what of consequence could possibly comprise the life of one so seemingly inconsequential?
Shou is introduced to us in a packrat's hovel of an apartment, replaying his girlfriend breaking up with him on his answering machine, and desperately rummaging through a collection of lighters that don't work. He is, by all recognizable signs, a loser, when he is telephoned by his father and is told that his aunt Matsuko has been found murdered. His father tells the boy to clean out and collect anything relevant from her apartment. From there, the boy finds trinkets, old pictures, old friends and new friends which fade to musical flashbacks privy to audience eyes. Equal parts romantic drama, detective story, and musical, the life of Matsuko attempts to clarify through the fusion of these elements.
Nakashima garnered attention a couple years back in U.S. film circuits with his pop-culture-attuned debut, Kamikaze Girls. The story is of a Lolita-girl, a rococo-infused, Japanese twist on the Nabokov namesake, who meets a bousouzoku femme, literally translated as a "girl who makes violence," but who is really simply a biker girl. The film has its fun, but as a comment on modern Japanese subculture, it's small beer as a feminist cheer, concerned finally more with being PC than pop.
This second feature, written and directed by Nakashima, is in somewhat similar thematic waters and certainly near-identical visual waters, just with a toaster thrown into the tub. The look of the film jumps out at you, which is essentially Kamikaze Girls with the screen resolution turned to maximum. Those soft pastels have been traded for deeply saturated pastels. It's hard to dig a color palette that makes your characters and scenery look like pieces of a dollhouse. The unfortunate borrowing from Amelie is unmistakable here: competing for your short attention span is garishly florescent scenery versus computer generated insects and birds and such, flying and frolicking around the human figures without point. Nakashima seems to love these little pop culture asides -- the sound of a chime paired with the twinkle of a man's big smile; the numerous anime-type exaggerated facial expressions; the townsfolk breaking out into a commercial jingle -- but there's little reward to go along with the recognition. Thirty-some years ago, Star Wars was great pop fun, but with these films there won't be much to observe in ten years besides what the boob-tube ads were like.
For what it's worth, that glaring pigmentation has its startling moments, especially in the musical numbers which showcase increasingly inventive ways of positioning its characters, particularly eyebrow-raising in the whorehouse scene. The songs, written and performed by a number of J-pop artists including Bonnie Pink, Kaeru Kimura, AI, YOSHIKA, and even Nakatani herself, are fun to dance and hum to, but lyrically, they nearly all are your typical J-pop: easy, superficial emotion. Let us consider the English lyrics of Ms. Pink's contribution, "LOVE IS BUBBLE" (caps not mine):
Love is bubble
Love is trouble
But I could be lovable
If you pay me double
Love is a bubble? Its veneer is made of soap? It leaves a sticky residue when you touch it? Well, that's not bad; I can dig that. Granted, this song is sung in a bordello, and that rhyme could be a lot worse. Love is rubble is too obvious. Love is a shovel -- no, that's a pseudo-rhyme. Love is stubble? Short, but could be trimmer. After all of this, the tracklist gives a brief portrait of the inner workings of Matsuko, but they feel more like commercial breaks in a football game getting away from the main action.
All of these asides should be discussed frankly as what they are: distractions from the weightless material on screen. The film is taking a crack at the post-human musical, which was revived a few years back with Moulin Rouge, but was really done to perfection many years before with Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters in Pennies from Heaven. Nakashima is a clever storyteller, but he's a terrible writer and Matsuko is even worse than its predecessor in its narrative structure, which is monotonously incremental. Without unduly spoiling things, over the course of a very full life, signaled by dozens of costume changes and hairstyles, Matsuko is simply revealed to be a philanthropist of the heart, doling out love in equal proportion to the beatings and suffering lavished upon her by nearly all of her ill-chosen suitors. Her sole mistake: to have poor judgment, one can only conclude.
In return for her beatings, Matsuko chooses to adore whoever abuses her indiscriminately and exponentially, believing fervently that it's "better than being alone." Relationships are entered into again and again by our heroine, whose desperation is explained away by a convenient miserable childhood, including a cold father (is there any other filmic kind?) who provides little masculine support or paternal caring. The effective conclusion we draw from this, of course, is that Matsuko's life, like Kane's, was kismet. What a defense attorney Nakashima could be! Everything but the bloodhounds snapping at her rear end!
Carl Jung once remarked that sentimentality is "a superstructure covering brutality." I can think of no clearer recent example of this in art than the film's decision to raise Matsuko to the level of sainthood for her pains. The case of her martyrdom is at least questionable, but the film doesn't even consider it, rather, letting her mistakes in life do the explaining. Nakashima has remarked in interviews that he had no conception originally of what kind of character Matsuko was. "I wanted to meet Matsuko, so I made the movie," he has said. Well, good for him, bad for me. Rather than making Matsuko into a character, the film makes her into a conception of a character, an idea rather than a functioning human being. It's why it's so gleeful to watch her get kicked around -- she refuses to learn or grow from any of it. If Mother Teresa is a saint, Matsuko is a moron and a masochist.
While all of this sounds scathing, anger and contempt are emotions one is not likely to feel while watching Matsuko, a small part being that the director's touch ensures the film is mostly light and frothy and even by the end of no real consequence, but in larger part due to the nice acting by Nakatani. Nakatani has appeared in these pages before, but never as a real standout. Here, she is forced to carry an entire film on her own, and she does it quite well. Her character is poorly written and the pacing of the film gives her little time to convey emotional development, but she shows incredible range with Matsuko anyway. She displays the full gamut, seeming at times to rise about the Pollyanne-like instincts of her role to instead breathe into the character, supplying the occasional revealing detail. She displays a decent ability for slapstick with a silly exercise routine for "training" as a prostitute, as well as a wonderful Kathy Bates homage when she icily stabs a flouncing boxer lover who has just told her to get packing. Wicked stuff. My favorite scene is a small one: after being dumped by a married man, she kneels pathetically next to her dinner, smiles in disbelief, changes her expression to choke back a sob, and swiftly smashes the nearest object and bleats hysterically. The film doesn't linger, but Nakatani's brevity and severity of gesture communicates naturally and efficiently. It's the film's redeeming performance.