In this intricately layered film, the nature of actresses and what they gain from acting is explored. The lives of three actresses are laid bare, and scenes from their lives are woven in and out of interviews with each of them. Each of them has experienced a traumatic event which contributes to their particular enjoyment of becoming someone else in dramatic roles.
Tag: JAPAN
Two young people are finally able to marry, but the war intervenes almost immediately and the husband never returns from it. The wife, however, lives on like an ever-reviving phoenix through her destructive experiences.
Kon Ichikawa’s rich adaptation of Natsume Soseki’s classic novel depicts a complex relationship between a student and an older man he calls “sensei.” The older man’s relations with his wife seems curiously strained to the student. When the boy goes to the country to tend to his dying father, he learns that “sensei” committed suicide.
Oharu is the daughter of Kyôsai Shimura, a samurai who now makes his living making umbrellas. She is in love with another samurai, Reisaburô Asai, who lives next door, but he is being pursued by two of the town beauties, Otomi and Fujio. To make things even more difficult for Oharu, her father is obsessed with antiques, buying them even though he has little money and even when most of them eventually turn out to be fakes. A mistake, however, puts him deeply in debt to the local lord, Tanbanokami Minezawa, and he is confronted with having to sell Oharu in order to pay it off.
A second-generation Korean-Japanese taxi driver suffers chronic discrimination and pursues a romance with a pretty Filipina who works as a B-girl at his mother’s nightclub.
Natsuko nurses a helpless crush on her roommate Mitsu and tries to possess her for herself by generating conflict between Mitsu and her boyfriend, Hideo. Mitsu discovers what is happening and throws Natsuko out of the apartment. But Natsuko cannot bring herself to sever the one-way emotional bond.
After Japan’s loss in the war, the wealthy, cultured, liberal Anjo family have to give up their mansion and their way of life. They hold one last ball at the house before leaving. The seemingly cold, cynical son secretly grieves for his defeated father and the values that the war destroyed, while the daughter tries to prevent father from taking his life and to find her own place in the new Japan
An old man, being rowed along a river, sees a field of daisies (or Wild Chrysanthemums, as they are described in the title), and thinks back to when he was fifteen. He recalls his time with, and away from, the girl cousin he grew up with and would have married, except the family and other pressures got in the way.