187 - Double Suicide, 1969, Japan. Dir. Masahiro Shinoda.
Jihei, stop your nonsense. Cheating is a whore's job.
This is the advice Jihei's brother gives him when Jihei complains.
Jihei has fallen in love with Koharu, a courtesan, a category of indentured prostitution. He owns a paper shop, is almost thirty, and has a wife and two children.
Yet he risks throwing it all away to fall in love with Koharu.
Then he accuses her of cheating on him.
His brother maintains that Koharu is, after all, a courtesan, and she is, after all, just doing her job.
But the cheating of which Jihei is speaking runs deeper than that.
The problem is that she is indentured and needs to be redeemed from her servitude.
We might think of Ruth's search for a kinsman redeemer, whom she finds in Boaz.
Jihei wants to be Koharu's redeemer but cannot afford it.
His business competitor Tahei, however, can.
Koharu seems to be yielding to Tahei and planning to let him redeem her, and this is what Jihei sees as her infidelity.
She has, after all, fallen in love with Jihei as well, and she has dampened her own business for his sake.
Meanwhile, Osan, Jihei's wife, has her own perspective. She stands with him, bears up under her situation, and fights to keep her husband--and the courtesan--from dying. Her concern is for their family, the business, and for Jihei.
She states, "A woman in love is strong. She won't yield easily."
And Osan and Koharu surprisingly form a bond of their own, both women understanding one another, both women fighting.
Osan is even willing to pawn all of her and the children's kimonos to help redeem Koharu, possibly making her a housemaid or cook, to relieve the situation, to keep the family together.
Her own father will have none of it, and he intervenes, shaming Osan for her actions.
In the end, everything will fall apart, and Jihei and Koharu will find themselves together, alone, left to do the deed.
Monzaemon Chikamatsu wrote his play--upon which our movie is based--in 1720.
Double Suicide is an 18th-century puppet show.
An old art form, called bunraku, about a shinju, or lovers' suicide.
Our director, Masahiro Shinoda, is a man of the theatre, and he has chosen to stage the film as a kind of live bunraku, a live puppet show, with the artifice exposed.
We begin with real puppeteers backstage preparing real puppets. The puppets are large and intricate, and the puppeteers are experienced and skillful.
We hear the voice of Shinoda calling his screenwriter, Taeko Tomioka, on the telephone. He asks her how the script is coming along. She tells him that the suicide part is difficult and asks if he has found a location. He tells her that it will take place in a cemetery, in a ravine near Mt. Toribe in Kyoto, a place with "strange headstones."
As they discuss the aesthetics of this choice, we continue to see the puppeteers, and then we see him., himself now dressed as a puppeteer on stage, a kuroko, all in black and with a black hood with a screen mask.
We will see the kuroko throughout the movie, functioning as puppeteers for the real people who perform live action, and I wonder if perhaps the director, Shinodo, will continue as the chief kuroko, and if perhaps he himself is the last kuroko we see when we get to the suicide scene.
In that scene, one puppeteer, one kuroko, stands behind the actors who play Jihei and Koharu, as they carry out their pact. Since he has established himself as a kuroko in this opening scene phone call, it would make sense that the main kuroko in the end be the director himself.
While on the phone, he explicitly states to Tomioka that "A suicide sequence in Kabuki style won't do." You can read online articles that relate this film to Kabuki, but that goes against what the director explains in the film.
Tomioka expounds his point on the phone, explaining that death is portrayed as being beautiful in Kabuki, whereas here in bunraku, it should be realistic.
He responds that for that scene the images are more important than the dialogue. He will allow the actors to improvise and not fully follow the script in that scene. However, the images will be important. They agree to discuss it tomorrow when they see each other in person.
We continue to see the puppeteers, the kuroko, now all of them dressed, all in black, wearing the black hoods with screen masks.
And with the final credits we pan down across one kuroko to two puppet heads, bodiless, presumably representing the two lovers, on the floor, and then to the final title cards.
Shinoda does not credit himself, the director, last, as nearly all movies do, but he reserves that honor for the original playwright, Monzaemon Chikamatsu.
With the stately marching of a large drum corps, we now open on the highly curved bridge that will prove prominently in the film.
Jihei walks across it, past the drummers, stops in the middle, and looks down upon the two bodies, one of them himself, watched over by the kuroko standing in the stream below.
We cut back inside the theatre, with different percussion, and watch as actors pass by slats and flats, representing the pleasure houses. A kuroko blows out a candle and everyone freezes.
Jihei walks among the frozen people, onto the stage. This represents the walks he took into the red lantern district when he began meeting with Koharu.
We pan down the bodies of two lovers, standing like dancers in a frozen pose, the male's backside fully tattooed from neck to thighs.
Then we see two other lovers, separated, him reclining, her standing, as Jihei walks past, hood pulled up.
The kuroko move through, block our view, and separate, revealing a memory.
Jihei sits, dressed in character, no hood, as Koharu stands, throwing papers to the floor, complaining that he cannot redeem her, insisting that she loves him and has not broken her vow to him.
Keiko McDonald has written a book, Japanese Classical Theater in Films (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1994), in which she explains the stages of conflict in Jihei's character over the course of the film.
Ninji is individual passion.
Giri is social duty.
The two are mutually exclusive.
By pursuing the former, Jihei is eventually forced to yield to the latter and accept their incompatibility. He will go through six stages of conflict, the final one being the suicide itself.
McDonald also maps out the various images that Shinoda has placed on the walls and floors, which represent various psychological and emotional states as Jihei works through the stages.
In the end, the single puppeteer who overlooks the couple appears like an executioner, a kind of representative of the Grim Reaper. This may not have been Shinoda's intention, and it may not have been the kuroko's function, but it seems to work that way for us.
Double Suicide is a highly stylized film that combines various art forms--from drama to puppetry to live theatre to calligraphy to cinematography--and exposes the artifice as a part of its art.
The acting can be replete with hysteria, with loud shrieking and screaming and crying, but once you adjust to it, you can appreciate the depths of characterization that the actors have achieved.
And hats off to Shima Iwashita, the actress who plays both the wife Osan and the courtesan Koharu, creating two completely different and very strong women.
This is a film that one appreciates more the more one understands it.
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