Directors of TV commercials have to quickly grab easily distracted viewers. When they move into feature films, many still assume short attention spans - and blitz audience eyeballs accordingly.
Looking at the trailer of Nakashima Tetsuya’s Memories Of Matsuko (Kiraware Matsuko no Issho), it’s easy to believe this veteran director of TV commercials, as well as the hit female-buddy comedy Kamikaze Girls (Shimotsuna Monogatari, 2004), falls into this category. The rush of CG-assisted images are colorful, bubbly and glitzy to point of self parody. The title character, a girl we first see watching a musical stage show with her dour dad (Emoto Akira), is so smiley and bright-eyed that she might pop from sheer delight. Surely this has to be a comedy?
But the girl (Nakatani Miki) grows up and, instead of meeting the Prince Charming of her dreams, suffers every possible calamity: At a provincial junior high school where she teaches in the early 1970s, she nobly takes responsibility for a student's theft - and is fired. Rejected by her family, she reels from one bad relationship to another. Seeking love, she finds only abandonment, abuse and, finally, prison.
Her salvation, ironically, is Ryu (Iseya Yusuke), the young thief who cost her the teaching job. Now a gangster, he encounters Matsuko on her downward slide and falls in love with her. She returns his passion and, after her release from prison, finds happiness with him. It can’t last, though.
Sounds depressing, doesn’t it? But asked to clean Matsuko’s disaster zone of a flat, her slacker nephew (Eita) discovers mementos of her checkered past, and realizes that she lived life to the full, never giving up her dream of love.
The splashy visuals and brassy musical numbers that seemed to verge on the callous take on new meaning and weight. They express the inner Matsuko, in all her irrepressible vitality and optimism. Nakashima’s approach - including up-tempo song-and-dance numbers to celebrate Matsuko’s downer existence - may look outright odd, but he used a similar one in Kamikaze Girls, an exuberantly surreal, candy-colored romp about two outsider girls - one a sneering punk biker, another a frilly fashionista - who become unlikely allies and friends. Matsuko, in other words, is Nakashima being Nakashima. Expecting this master of visual fireworks to film a sober, tasteful social document is like expecting Tom Wolfe to write a measured, balanced, dull-as-dust editorial.
Based on Yamada Muneki’s eponymous best-selling novel, Matsuko in almost any other hands would be a dark melodrama about a woman who loved too well, lived too recklessly and drew no winning numbers in life’s lottery. Nakashima’s approach avoids - or rather explodes - genre clichés, but he also keep the focus firmly on his central message: Love gives life its value, despite appearances to the contrary.
Nakatani Miki shows her comic side in Matsuko, especially in her scenes as a fallen woman, but she never loses sight of her character’s passion - and persistence. There is a direct line from the little girl bubbling with romantic dreams and the woman holding onto her soul, while living a nightmare.