VERSE
Fandel, John
on account of its ahistorical approach, the film has been shot almost entirely on sound-stage interiors. The pristine, specially constructed quality this gives to each set and the patent movie...
...They give the historical episode the detached, abstracted feel of a fable...
...14 October 1977:660...
...It is as if Mitani were disappearing back into the very anonymity from which she rescued the now dead Osaki, the relationship between them having been a personal fulfillment and a momentary transcendence of history for them both...
...The fabled treatment which Kumai gave to Osaki's story is, then, an attempt to reflect Mitani's attitude toward it...
...Osaki's most affecting moment in the film comes when, as a result of her brother's rejection, she tries to drown herself in her bath...
...An important part of Osaki's story--to her, perhaps, the most important--is her ostracization when she tries to return to Japan...
...3 Billboard (elf) for sapphire panes of silence...
...Although she does serve primarily to narrate that sto~T and as a pretext for Osaki to tell it, the fact that she should do so is in Kumai's view almost as significant as the story itself...
...The pristine, specially constructed quality this gives to each set and the patent movie lighting become the opposite of something pornographic...
...That esteem reverses her status in Japanese society...
...The reason for this kind of treatment in Kumai's film, as in Oshima's, is to shift the natural emphasis of the story...
...No longer a source of degradation, having been a karayuki-san has now become a source almost of honor...
...Osaki's memories, which are sound-stage reconstructions like the sets in Oshima's film, also have a clean and fabled atmosphere...
...She is so dispirited by her realization she is now an outcast that she is too weak even to hold her head under the water...
...The final image of the film is a remote high-angle shot in which Mitani hurries along a busy city street in Borneo, presumably on her way back to her own family in Japan, and is lost in the crowd...
...Just as Oshima wanted to offset the potential for pornography in his script, so Kumai wanted to shift our attention away from Osaki alone and toward Mitani as well...
...At the end of Sandakan #8 Mitani is in Borneo t o find a graveyard Osaki told her about where the karayuki-san colony buried its dead...
...Even her brother, who loves her so much he cripples himself in his anguish when she is taken away, will not take her back into his home again after she has been a karayuki-san...
...Now another Japanese film, Sandakan #8, which has only just arrived here though it was made before Oshima's film, seems to have very much the same quality as Oshima's...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Even in the hut where Osaki lives now, the evening light is often roseate and the effect almost that of an idyll...
...On the one hand, its freedom from sordidness spares Osaki unnecessary shame...
...Living out her old age in abject poverty in Japan, Osaki tells her story to a young woman she meets, Mitani (Yoko Takashi), who is a university student doing research in women's history...
...Director Kei Kumai was also dealing in this film with a disgraceful episode in the sexual history of Japan, and he did so in a way comparable to In the Realm of the Senses...
...The historical issue in Sandakan #8 is the existence in Japan earlier in this century of "karayuki-san," young women who were sold off by their impoverished families into indentured apprenticeships as prostitutes in other parts of Asia...
...They don't idealize or belie Osaki's suffering, but they don't try to objectify it either...
...Because her treatment at home is her bitterest humiliation, Mitani's esteem for her assumes a crucial significance in her story...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 JOHN FANDEL DAMSELFLY Chopper for the Emperor of ants...
...It is a very moving conclusion...
...For the role of Mitani is not just the simple frame for Osaki's story that it at first appears...
...On the other hand, the abstracted quality produced by Kumai's refraining from extreme realism this way makes Osaki appear to us what she is to Mitani: a figure of legend, a woman whose endurance makes her heroic...
...2 Bobbin, shuttling gauze of summer air...
...But the film is otherwise free, in both Osaki's present and her memories of the past, from any compulsion to show us squalor...
...When Mitani first comes to the hut in which Osaki lives, she shrinks back at the sight of nightcrawlers nesting in the filth there...
...After she has found and restored this burial ground, she notices, as her final line the film informsus, that the graves are all set with their backs turned to Japan...
...It's the sort of mythic twilight in which deities repose...
...The romantic dusk lighting where Osaki sits telling her story shows her to us as the object of Mitani's reverence...
...Because Kumai's treatment thus enhances and expresses the relationship between the two women, making it, rather than Osaki's story alone, the subject of the film, that treatment is really far more interesting than the similar one in In the Realm o/the Senses...
...More specifically, the film tells the story of one such woman, Osaki (Kinuyo Tanaka), who is shipped off to Borneo during her childhood, is forced into prostitution after working as a servant in a whorehouse there, and only gets to return to Japan many years later...
Vol. 104 • October 1977 • No. 21
