Flowers

Norihiro Koizumi

The story: The lives of six women across three generations unfold in Japan from the 1930s to the present. In 1936, Rin (Yu Aoi from Hula Girls, 2006) runs away when she is about to be married off to a man she has never met. The 1960s track the stories of her three grown daughters – Kaoru (Yuko Takeuchi from Be With You, 2004), coping with the grief of losing her husband; Midori (Rena Tanaka from First Love, 2000), who struggles with feminism and femininity; and Sato (Yukie Nakama from Gokusen: The Movie, 2009), who is willing to risk death to have a second child. In the present day, Sato’s daughters Kana (Kyoka Suzuki from Welcome Back, Mr McDonald, 1997) and Kei (Ryoko Hirosue from Departures, 2008) wrestle with expectations and major life decisions.

This will someday make for an interesting cultural studies paper: What kind of a film gets made when a coterie of top-notch actresses is assembled and what does it reveal about attitudes towards women?

There was the tepid remake of the classic about relationships, The Women (2008), from the United States, the deliciously dark and comic murder mystery 8 Women (2002) from France and a documentary-style expose Actresses (2009) from South Korea.

Now comes Flowers from Japan.

There is much to enjoy in this film with its gorgeous cinematography and attention to period detail. It goes from presenting black-and-white scenes of 1930s Japan which evoke the works of the late feted film-maker Yasujiro Ozu to lovingly recreated and colour-corrected depictions of the country in the 1960s.

It is not just the visual details but also changing social mores which are reflected, from strictly defined women’s roles in the 1930s to casual sexual harassment in the 1960s to seeming liberation today.

Director Norihiro Koizumi makes the transitions from one story to another, one era to another, seamless through the use of recurring motifs.

The film is edited in such a way that answers to questions are withheld, thus holding the viewer’s attention. What happens to Rin after she runs away? How did she end up with three daughters?

Then there are the actresses themselves, who are big enough stars in Japan that the film simply opens with beautifully composed shots of each one and her name up on the screen.

There are no dud performances as such though Rena Tanaka’s spunky Midori and Ryoko Hirosue’s ever cheerful Kei are among the more appealing. Hirosue and Kyoka Suzuki also team up for a genuinely moving scene after Kei finds a handwritten note from her mother to the two sisters.

Yet despite all this, the film falls short at the end when it suggests that a woman’s true happiness comes only when she has a child. Surely that is too limiting a message in this time and age.

(ST)