Unfading wild roses The name can be translated in different ways: “Permanent “Wild Rose”, aka “Permanent Nobara”, aka “Invariable Nobara” and even, if accelerated, “Unfading wild rose”. All options are "shot" in the film.
On the one hand, it is a very complementary film to women. There are many and generous pity for them here. On the other hand, they are no less generously mocked. On the third hand, they are very well and astutely understood - critically, without discounts on the floor, but also fairly, without unnecessary perversion. In general, there is probably no image here that is not ambiguous, even multivalent, and it is easy to see only one side, for example, there is a temptation to consider the film gloomy-heavy or, conversely, frivolous. Daihachi himself calls his films comedies, he practiced the same with the stories and plays of the Chekhs, and, by the way, their worlds are very similar. A province where nothing happens but micro-tragedies and crashes inside people stuck in routine and hopelessness; and the people themselves, meanwhile, walk, eat, joke and hold on, are often somehow very light and uplifted. The fact that the author laughs at them, that they themselves laugh at themselves, and that the reader and the viewer laugh at them, does not negate the fact that people die and there is nothing fun in looking at a drowning man in a swamp.
At the very center of the film is still not a female share, but beauty. And the beauty is external. The beauty salon, by the name of which the film is named, the crowds of women, bound by the maintenance of beauty - rather sweet beauty - chasing after her, and the scattering of handsome men, to whom the main characters of the film have always been loyal. Naturally, this would not be a film by Daihachi Yoshida, if the beauty here is not well twirled, but not breaking down the myth of its value, but it would be flat, and dull, and untrue. Here it is done very subtly, all the same technique of ambiguity. The permanent symbolizing for women “for...” a certain constant of beauty, a convenient, practical and long-term perm-painting, is cloned from the small and funny lamb of Nobara-san on the heads of dozens of its visitors and is truly a constant value. However, from the outside, these rings are not just ridiculous, they also look mocking (a herd of sheep), and in general this spectacle is the apotheosis of absurdity. At the same time, is the absurdity of outright ugliness worse? In the film, there is a scene when Nobara-san and his daughter Naoko visit a couple of bums, shaggy, gray and dirty, sitting motionless half-cadavers in a dark trash, and cut them. No, no one makes a lamb permanent for grandmother, limiting himself to a pretty hairstyle, but neatly trimmed marasmatic half-buddies sitting in the same trash, looking motionlessly and pointlessly into space, look no less creepy, and if you look at gawky permanent aunts with laughter and lively sympathy, then you do not want to smile here somehow. And meanwhile, this is almost the only faithful couple in the whole film, such aggravated Afanasy Ivanovich and Pulcheria Ivanovna. Active deromantization of the image of loyalty to old age - no strolling through the park hand in hand cute old men looking at each other with tenderness. But solitary throws, strong and inflexible as their permanent, albeit ridiculous, sometimes enchantingly funny, but they are alive, and if their pursuit of beauty is a series of gags, then their life-affirming energy is truly beautiful. At the same time, the faithful couple remains a faithful couple, and Nobara-san sadly envies these old men. And the same Daihachi Yoshida, without any mockery, introduces pure beauty into the film - all three girlfriends, Naoko, Tomo-chan and Mit-chan, play beautiful pretty girls in childhood, the children of their beautiful fathers, and their sad and funny future is still far away, and the beauty embodied in them blooms with a young living flower, and this is probably the only moment when you rejoice that handsome men were chosen as their fathers - a moment of pure admiration of beauty regardless of female and human fate, and even that children's bicycle, which seems to be preceded by an adult father.
“Nobara’s Permanent” is also a film about three generations of women, or rather, two, because the fate of her granddaughter is only likely similar to the fate of her grandmother and mother. And despite the fact that there is this “constant of women of Nobar”, there are differences, there is, after all, a sharp difference in the very characters of mother and daughter. So the failures with the “goat men” were inherited by both Naoko friends from their mothers, and in general, as Mit-chan says, this is the curse of all women. The heroines want to understand why this happens to them, and one of Naoko’s stepfathers gives an answer: they always choose handsome people, and handsome people are famous bastards. But it's too easy. “It’s their fault,” says Naoko, but how can she be to blame for the only choice she made in her youth? And the whole line of Naoko, in principle, is not played with irony; however, it is also the most conventional line, the most "feminine" and the most nesisidovskaya.
The rest of the “girls” of all ages, one way or another, can really admit to themselves in despicability for beautiful faces combined with rotten nature and really got what they chose, but who said that a different choice would make them happy? In fact, they have always made the most natural choice, the desire of the heart, and is it not better to love for a short time than to endure for a long time? But there is no doubt that the price for this natural choice is just as natural - and Daihachi Yoshida makes a lot of fun of the whining of women who genuinely wonder why they are being punished. It is not women or their misfortunes that are ridiculed, but their reluctance to pay the bills, and not even that they are directly ridiculed – but are shown ambiguously. No, the film does not offer a clumsy alternative to choose men more accurately and more caringly, no matter how obnoxious they may be - Daihachi Yoshida does not offer anything to anyone at all, he simply "shines" the female world with the sharp critical eye of dry intello, who, in general, does not care what they choose there - it is important that lies and confusion are not created at the same time. This is not a sexist view: after all, the same film can be made about the world of men – they also have their own problems and narrow-mindedness. Such a view may lack an understanding of perhaps the most intimate, girlish, vague aspirations for happiness and a beautiful thirst for a dazzlingly brilliant ideal, but it is clear and crystalline. That's valuable, too. And all this tinkering of the beautiful, ridiculous, shameful, pathetic, pretty is not directorial cockroaches, it is life itself such a cockroach, and he just clearly looks at it.