The Makioka Sisters (1983)*

DIRECTOR(S): Kon Ichikawa SCREENPLAY: Junichirô Tanizaki (Novel), Kon Ichikawa CAST: Keiko Kishi, Yoshiko Sakuma, Sayuri Yoshinaga, Yûko Kotegawa, Jûzô Itami

The Makioka Sisters is Kon Ichikawa's intimate portrait of a family caught in time. Adapted from the novel of the same name by Junichirô Tanizaki, the film is very much in the tradition of mid Ozu, as echoes of Late Spring filter into the story of four Osakan sisters left as caretakers of the family name. The film's happenings center on the crucial balance of tradition and the outside world: the big dilemma for Taeko (Yuko Kotegawa), for instance, is who she is to marry; Tsuruko (Keiko Kishi), the eldest, and her husband, meanwhile, attempt to keep the family name in check.

Time is a moving force in the film and it's in how Ichikawa shows it that the film becomes a work of art. Cherry blossoms become a motif for the fall of the family and the passage of time; "we won't get to see the cherry blossoms," one character says near the end of the film after [Spoiler Alert!] it is revealed the family must move to Tokyo. Ichikawa is always contrasting the outside with the inside: on the outside his camera is open, absorbing the nature around it; on the inside his camera moves, Mizoguchi style, closely--tracking, panning carefully, always observant. By the heartbreaking end, when both the inside and the outside match in one beautifully observed sequence, time seems to have, at least for a second, stopped, its characters walking away from the fall of the house of Makioka.