Tuesday, October 09, 2007
Miho Kanno
Miho Kanno had to play Sawako almost without speaking. She spends a lot of time on screen and is featured in many close-ups. It must intimidating to try and play such a role and develop your character with almost no lines. But I was impressed with her performance. It was a good call to have her fixate on color and minutia. Color was almost a character in this movie. And I thought the scenes with the blow toy were wonderful. Sawako’s frustration after the ball was crushed was a poignant reflection of her incomprehension of how her life had also been crushed.
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11 comments:
She was great.
Ooops ... in an earlier post I hadn't seen your comment about color being a character in the movie. Is it simplistic to say that the color red was supposed to be love? Security? It played through all the storylines.
Agreed, Ben, she was great. And I also wondered what was going through her head when she was fixated on that toy.
Yes Cl, that probably is simplistic. In the interview on the disk, Kitano says that he is happy to have people interpret as they wish, but he didn’t have detailed symbolism in mind. Now, of course, authors often demure about interpretation, but in this case, I think Kitano was deliberate about filling his film with symbols but also making sure that they were underdetermined.
There was also a lot of blood in the movie, so you could equally say red was violence and a marker for loss. I think the tension was intended.
Her fixation on the toy really was crucial, wasn’t it? You knew something was going on in her head—just because she couldn’t speak didn’t mean she was blank. But it was also obvious that this wasn’t the Sawako that Matsumoto knew and maybe her thoughts were incomprehensible.
I thought there was a sense that in her madness after the betrayal that she lost all sense of herself. She tried to obliterate her self through suicide. Then she became a person without a past. Identity is based on having a past. She became a shell with seemingly nothing more than basic motor skills. And then she has has her remembrance of things past. That moment was so incredible — the way they look at each other, that terrible acknowledgment all blended with this binding love.
There was definitely something child-like in her devotion to the toy.
Matsumoto deserves praise as well. He also worked with a certain amount of stoicism, but Sawako's madness seemed contagious, and I wondered whether he would bring her back or if she would take him down with her.
... like he needed so much to empathize with what he did to her that he would go not just physically but mentally where her loss took her.
(I had my rosy-colored glasses on for this film, folks.)
cl, I had the same feeling about his empathy. As soon as he realized he had ruined her life he was ready to ruin his own to make things as right they could ever be. When the friend tells him that it'd do no good for him to go to her because she wouldn't recognize them, that didn't faze him. It wasn't something he was doing for himself; it was something he was doing for her, so the fact that she didn't recognize him was beside the point. He recognized her, and more importantly, what he had done to her, what his obligation was.
Is Matsumoto a more sympathetic figure because he renounced Sawako not of his own choosing but because he was being a dutiful son? After he realizes the terrible outcome from his action, he is done with fulfilling family and social expectation and instead pursues a direct moral responsibility.
Yeah, I think he's more sympathetic because he made a bad decision based on filial duty, not based on personal greed. His male friends acted like of course they would dump someone for the boss' daughter, like they'd have to be a complete idiot not to.
What I wondered was this: Did the severity of her reaction to being dumped matter in the moral calculus? That is, if she had just stopped eating for a few days, been incredibly sad for a few months and then gotten on with her life, would he still have had the same moral responsibility? Or would his action be rendered less culpable when accompanied by the notion that, hey, people have breakups, most of them get over it, it's not the end of the world?
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