Maborosi (Koreeda Hirokazu, 1995) (Patreon)

BY REQUEST: Maxwell S.

I'm not sure exactly how long ago I first saw Maborosi, since I only have screening logs going back to 2001. I am fairly sure it was the second Koreeda film I saw, going back to it after seeing (and very much enjoying) After Life in first-run at the Castro. A lot of it came back to me on this, my second viewing, at least 23 years later. But of course, it's a very different experience now that I am so familiar with Koreeda as an artist and have seen his broader trajectory. 

When I was on Letterboxd getting basic info about Maborosi, I discovered that two years before making his feature debut he produced a documentary about Taiwanese cinema, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang specifically. I saw this after I'd already rewatched about half of Maborosi, but I was already thinking that the Taiwanese New Wave influence was impossible to miss. From shot selection to framing to the treatment of figures in the landscape, Maborosi is as much of an homage to Yang and Hou as Café Lumiere is to Ozu. But it seems Koreeda got it out of his system early, since he never made another film quite this downcast or formalist.

And that's kind of a bummer. In theory we want to see artists develop beyond the anxiety of influence. But to my eyes Koreeda has only gotten less interesting over the years, wedded as he is to an upper-middlebrow Japanese classicism and a sentimental streak that might make Spielberg wince. Not so with Maborosi, a film that is thematically bleak and structurally withholding, permeated with a deep chiaroscuro that often obliterates the actors onscreen and generally looks as if it was shot through a brown glass beer bottle. In fact, although Koreeda does offer us numerous Ozuisms (above all, trains moving through the outskirts of the city, a quotidian way of marking time), the first half's scenes of industrial claustrophobia vaguely resemble Tarkovsky. This shifts once Yumiko (Makiko Esumi) leaves the city for coastal Washima, but the turbulence of the Sea of Japan maintains the elemental power one sees in Mirror and The Sacrifice.

But what is perhaps most impressive about Maborosi, especially as a debut feature, is Koreeda's unwillingness to provide exposition or, at times, even orientation. It's true that the film's central trauma is also a mystery. Why did Yumiko's first husband (Tadanobu Asano) commit suicide? But this basic confusion is mapped onto the narrative experience for the viewer, who meets various characters or witnesses events that are only recognizable much later in the film. To take but one crucial example, we don't really understand how Yumiko ends up with her second husband (Takashi Naito) until she goes back to her hometown for her brother's wedding and thanks an old woman who played matchmaker.

Suffice to say, Koreeda would never again engage in such audience-unfriendly tactics. One seldom sees such narrative parsimony outside an Angela Schanelec film, and certainly Hou and Yang did not avoid articulation of story to that degree (although at times Hou came close). I suspect that this had more to do with Koreeda's transition from documentary filmmaking, where information can reasonably be parsed in a more organic, observational manner, on the assumption that a milieu will become more transparent the more time we spend within it.

I guess what I'm saying is, Koreeda was at his most interesting when he was trying to understand contemporary Taiwanese cinema by adapting or translating it. To give another example, I can't think of another Koreeda film that employs music in such a lush, emotional manner or one that pushes it so hard to the foreground. Then I discovered that Maborosi was scored by Taiwanese composer Chen Ming-chang, who also wrote the music for Dust in the Wind and The Puppetmaster. There's no denying that Maborosi is atypical Koreeda, but looking at it now, it almost suggests a road not taken. Koreeda would have developed his own creative voice regardless, but he might've found his own unique combination of melodrama and austerity. Instead, he took the less interesting path, the social lyricism of Shoplifters, Like Father Like Son, and indeed, Monster.