Riyo is so outraged that she doesn't realize Matsuji is as disappointed in her as she is in him. Matsuji went about landing his new bride in a fairly dishonest fashion, to be sure, but Riyo's parents weren't exactly straight with him, either. He was led to anticipate a robust young farm woman who could slave away in the sugar cane for hours without a break, as Matsuji has done since arriving here from Japan two decades ago. The wide-eyed apparition he's looking at right now couldn't have sprung from rural stock. She's a slender city girl with doe eyes, small hands, and delicate sensibilities--skittish, spoiled, and easily driven to pouting.
This is the setup of Picture Bride, the sort of movie that only works if its makers are willing to stress genuine human emotion over plot contrivance. Fortunately, although Japanese-American filmmaker Kayo Hatta (who co-wrote the screenplay with her sister, Mari Hatta), has a fine eye for compositions and a good sense of how to create a thick, rich, almost tactile sense of atmosphere, she's never arty or pretentious. She loves actors, and she knows how to give them room to move and breathe.
Although the lush Hawaiian settings seem to promise a movie of old fashioned sweep and love-conquers-all philosophizing, Matta instead constructs a tale that delivers the opposite; under her steady directorial gaze, Hawaii's tropical forests, wind-swept coasts, misty mountains, and mazelike fields of sugarcane are presented as formidable challenges to her workaday characters--an unforgiving land that extracts a terrible toll on those who work it. A fire in the fields is staged with some of the same Old Testament fury as the plague of locusts in Terence Malick's 1978 Panhandle melodrama Days of Heaven. Even when the landscape is sunlit and still, it often seems more threatening than alluring.
Poor Riyo plots to save her money to return home but is crushed to realize she could work 10 lifetimes and still not be able to afford safe passage to Japan.
This life is hard on everybody--especially Riyo's best friend, a spunky field hand named Kana (the strikingly beautiful Tamlyn Tomita). Kana helps Riyo get closer to her goal of returning home by teaching her how to be a laundress, which pays better than field work. She gives Riyo emotional support, too, listening to Riyo's tales of domestic woe and countering them with stories of her own. Kana has watched as her once-sweet husband, Kanzaki (rakishly handsome Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, who played the preening Japanese playboy in Rising Sun), worn down by life into an abusive, drunken lout. Kana's determination to convince Riyo to seek out her new husband's love has a hidden, vicarious motive; in a sense, Kana is living her failed dreams of domestic bliss through Riyo, hoping the younger woman's happiness can rub off on her.
Despite its attention to hardship, Picture Bride isn't a downer. Director Hatta finds humor in situations of extreme disappointment, and she hangs back with her camera, letting the actors tease out the script's emotions without italicizing everything through needless closeups. And there's something wonderfully old movie-ish about Youki Kudoh, a fine-boned young actress best known to American audiences as the Elvis-obsessed Japanese exchange student in Mystery Train. Although Riyo inevitably flowers from a peevish girl into a sensible woman, the character always has a daft, childlike aura. (At times, Kudoh's wide-eyed looks of disbelief and betrayal evoke memories of the late Giulietta Masina, Federico Fellini's favorite leading lady of the '60s.)
She's an innocent abroad, and part of what makes the movie charming is her inability to process what happens to her. Like her husband, Riyo takes life one day at a time; rather than admit defeat and embrace unhappiness, she simply revises her expectations of life so that they match what fate has dealt her. Together, Riyo and Matsuji form the core of a modestly wrought, very unusual romance. The message is that bliss isn't found: it's made.
Picture Bride. Miramax. Youki Kudoh, Akira Takayama, Tamlyn Tomita, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Toshiro Mifune. Written by Kayo and Mari Hatta. Directed by Kayo Hatta. Opens May 19.
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