SHE WAS LIKE A WILD CHRYSANTHEMUM (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1955)

A tale of young love, like The Girl I Loved from nine years earlier, but even more pure and heartrending. The film is comprised mostly of the flashbacks of an elderly Masao (played by Chishu Ryu) as he visits the village of his youth, but by the end there are some ambiguous shifts in point of view. In either case, the flashbacks scenes are framed by a fixed white iris shot (it doesn't move in or out). Five years later, Truffaut would use irises in Shoot the Piano Player as a playful homage to silent film. Here though, the effect is more of the viewer piercing Masao's soul through memory-flooded eyes.

Per normal, Kinoshita is working with a simple narrative. Masao's flashbacks tell the story of the shared love between his 15-year-old self and Tamiko, his 17-year-old cousin who lives with his family. Everyone seems to know about and disapprove of their love; Masao and Tamiko even try to deny it, but silently they gesture toward a different truth.

Masao's mother has always been conflicted about the relationship between the young cousins and eventually decides to speed up Masao's departure for school, so as to break up any romance. While he's gone, Tamiko is forced home by a relentlessly unpleasant sister-in-law. There, she finds herself in an arranged marriage and becomes depressed. Masao's mother seals Tamiko's dark fate by telling her that there is absolutely no chance she would ever allow a relationship between the cousins.

But all that comes after the beautiful centerpiece of the film. Masao's mother allows the two a rare day working in the fields together. The cousins come closest to articulating their love here when they pick flowers that represent one another. Tamiko is like wild chrysanthemum (She asks "why?" to which Masao replies that he does now know) and Masao like a bellflower.

So often Kinoshita seems to just film nature and by chance capture the human lives and drama that pass through it. He seems to find the perfect amount of wind to gently rustle the flowers and wheat so that we're left with the resonant feeling of souls stirring beneath the empty words that society forces out of us.