Kinoshita was employed by the Shochiku Studios alongside such famous directors as Yasujiro Ozu and Mikio Naruse. Shochiku, helmed by the legendary Kido Shiro was famous for its social realist films characterized by socially engaged stories and minimalist film style. Kido even released a book in 1978 called My Theory of Filmmaking in which he described his view of how films should be produced. Kinoshita is oftentimes cited alongside Ozu, Naruse and Mizoguchi when Shochiko is being discussed, but he clearly is the odd man out among his peers. The social realist films of the time were, above all, concerned with questions of gender identities in the face of a sweeping modernization, with the symbol of the city, Tokyo first and foremost, as a kind of promised land and doomed place of failure at the same time where characters struggled and women especially faced defeat. In these movies, the Japanese countryside, where morals and tradition still seemed intact, always loomed as a sort of safe haven. I generalize, of course, but modern city life was under increasingly sharp critical scrutiny in Japanese cinema, especially in the post-war years. Kinoshita however, as far as I can tell after having seen five of his films, has no interest in the symbol of the city as a modern gulag and does not view the countryside with a favorable eye either. His cinema reverses the social realist tropes and is thus entirely unique.
In She Was Like a Wild Chrysanthemum, Kinoshita tells the story of a doomed love between two cousins, Masao and Tamiko, as recalled by a 73-year old Masao. As 15 and 17 year olds, the two lovers work together on the fields of their remote village, but gossiping villagers and Masao's ambitious mother hinder them to ever give in on their feelings for each other. Masao is sent off to high school and Tamiko marries a local. When Masao comes back to visit during a holiday, she is not in town. At the end of the film, Tamiko dies after a miscarriage. It is then revealed that 73-year old Masao
has come to his chilhood village to visit Tamiko's grave one last time.
She Was Like A Wild Chrysanthemum is as much a film about memories and how we remember the past, as it is about the love story. Told in long flashbacks, we see everything through an Iris filter, reminding us constantly that what we see are memories, not "facts". At the very beginning of the film, 73-year old Masao says himself that he doesn't remember everything exactly, which makes him an unreliable source for the narration. But we also get scenes in which neither him nor Tamiko are present, which poses the question of what old Masao actually recalls. Is he making these episodes up? Was his love for Tamiko of the same nature as he presents it to us 60 years later? The film is punctuated by prose verses whispered by the old man in voice over, and it heightens the general melancholic vibe. Is this just commentary to the story, or an indication that Masao presents us his story in more poetic terms? Kinoshita's almost scientific zeal to film the vegetation and wide fields of the countryside contributes to the feeling that we may attend an old man's overly doleful recollections of an adolescent crush, as it reminds us that a lot, if not most of our memories from childhood and adolescence are linked to memories of the locations where they took place. With that in mind, old Masao not only thinks back to his first love, but he also marvels at his time spent in the luscious countryside.
Kinoshita also uses the wide open countryside that spreads under a never ending sky to ironically underline how trapped Masao and Tamiko are in reality. They are both bound by conventions and restrictions. In addition to being too young to show their affection to each other, Masao must attend a prestigious high school and Tamiko, as a woman, does not have a lot of say in her marital destiny anyway. They live an out and out impossible love, although their feelings will never extinguish. With that, Kinoshita ultimately shows that old-time Japan was not any better than modern-time urban Japan. Men and Women always had to fulfill roles that were often at odds with their true will. Tradition and modern corporate city life are just different articulations of a restrictive environment that oppresses those living in it. This parallel might be incomplete and inaccurate, but the more I discover Kinoshita's work, the more I think that, although articulated entirely differently, he comments on modern issues just as much as his contemporaries who did it more overtly.
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