And Then
Sorekara
???
[1985 - Japāna]



Režisors: Yoshimitsu Morita
Žanrs: Drāma
IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091989/

Par filmu: WATCHING Yoshimitsu Morita's ''Sorekara'' (''And Then'') is like tuning in to the dream of a stranger. It's often very beautiful and exotic, but it remains teasingly remote, beyond the point of depth perception. Without the film's production notes (which aren't available to the ticket-buying public), I'm not at all sure I'd have had any reliable idea when it was taking place.

According to these notes, ''Sorekawa'' is set in Tokyo in 1909 and is based on a novel by Soseki Natsume, which was published in that year, when the modernization of Japan was well along though far from being universally accepted.

The film, which opens today at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema, is a social comedy, but it's written and directed with such discretion that it seems as if Mr. Morita has been too polite for his own good, much like the film's central character.

Daisuke (Yusaku Matsuda), the 30-ish younger son of a rich and powerful businessman, has broken away from his family to the extent that he lives in his own modest house, though the bills for it and for his servants are paid by the older brother who runs the family business.

Daisuke is a dedicated romantic. He reads. He responds to beauty. He looks down on trade and the new world of capitalism. With the arrogance of the very rich, he tells Hiraoka, a desperate, penniless, former classmate, that a career in business is only supportable if it's an extension of one's intellectual life.

Daisuke's serenity is disturbed when, after a separation of three years, he meets Michiyo, Hiraoka's wife, whom Daisuke loved without ever declaring himself. Instead, he had stepped aside to favor his friend. Now, however, Hiraoka has become an embezzler and philanderer and Michiyo a lonely, terminally sick woman. She has the self-effacing ways of the old-fashioned Japanese wife, but she doesn't hesitate to beg money from the rich - and essentially naive - Daisuke. He falls in love all over again.

This is the fascinating, distantly seen center of the film, which, much like 1909 Japan, mixes old-fashioned conventions with some startling, utterly mysterious new mannerisms. As he demonstrated in his original and funny ''Family Game,'' seen here in 1984, Mr. Morita is a major new talent in the Japanese cinema.

His movies look like those of no other contemporary director. He likes to interrupt what appears to be a straightforward narrative with surreal images, which sometimes have the function of question marks, sometimes of exclamation points. Sometimes they look like so much decoration.

In ''Sorekara'' he uses a new (to me) device that certainly is startling, and maybe too startling: he somehow manages to freeze the foreground images while the background images continue to move. It doesn't add anything of importance to the meaning of the film, but it does call attention to the man who made it.

''Sorekara'' is best when Mr. Morita seems to be doing least. The period details are evocative because they are not stressed. These include a grand garden party where the guests parade around in top hats, cutaways, white gloves and the kind of afternoon dresses that would not have been out of place at Buckingham Palace in 1909.

Japan's still insecure position in the Western scheme of things is touched on when three young men argue about politics. ''Japan is in debt,'' says one. ''We're inferior to Europe.''

Another says, ''People try to keep up.'' There are references to a terrible ''sugar scandal'' that is currently shaking the Japanese business community, but, like the caller in ''The Monkey's Paw,'' it remains forever offstage.

Along with Mr. Matsuda (who played the lunatic tutor in ''The Family Game'') as Daisuke, the excellent cast is headed by the venerable Chishu Ryu, one of the mainstays of Ozu's cinema, as Daisuke's old father. Miwako Fujitani and Kaoru Kobayashi play the film's two most interesting, most complex roles, those of the possibly duplicitous Michiyo and her opportunistic husband, Hiraoka.

Mr. Morita attempts to emphasize the universality of his story, and its associations to life in Japan today, with a narrative style that is so cool it seems almost distracted. In the program notes he says that though the film is set in 1909, the costumes and decor were purposely designed not to re-create a particular Meiji period but the sense of a '' 'Meiji culture,' as if making a science-fiction picture.''

However, ''Sorekara'' is most successful when it's utterly specific -when Mr. Morita allows the audience to make up its own mind about univeral applications.
-the new york times



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