In the evening, the favorite of the public stands on stage surrounded by water jets. In a light kimono, no longer young, not yet mature, slim, radiant, she looks like one of the water threads erupting from the vessels in her hands. At night, he walks by the bridge, remembering a boy-driver, a hot-tempered untouchable, a knight on a gray horse with a law textbook in a leaky pocket. A beautiful stranger sleeps on the bridge because of the girl, he, the son of an impoverished samurai, lost his job and dream. The girl's name is Tomo, but everyone knows and loves her under the name Taki no Shiraito. It is by this name, denoting the white jets of the waterfall, that the film based on the novel Mature and Masculine by Kyoki Izumi is named. Time is the end of the nineteenth century. The plot is eternal, as long as dreamy and amorous women are alive on earth, passionately wishing for happiness, but at best acquiring the posthumous status of a legend. In the role of Shiraito – the star of the silent, and then sound cinema Irie Takako. In the role of her lover and gifted – handsome Tokihiko Okada; the gift that already dying of tuberculosis, pale without makeup, he himself was the key to aesthetic excitement.
The silent film is provided not only with stingy subtitles, but also with generous accompaniment of the behind-the-scenes commentator-Bancy. Listening to a talented interpreter is a special pleasure. But almost more - turning off the sound, look at the characters who say little. The beauty of the absence is the aerobatics of directing, based on the practice of traditional theater. The beauty of such external stinginess, for which all the passion and agitation is there, under the skin, under the upper layer of the soul. The peak moments of chaste history are marked, but not fulfilled. How did a man’s gratitude for the night grow into love, and did it grow out, since she called herself wife and he called himself brother? How did the heroes go the last way, different, but almost equal to the mitiyuks of old plays? It doesn't matter. The real culminations were the moments of the highest display of nobility, when it was finally possible to give relative free rein to the senses. And from memory it is impossible to erase the dead face of the young prosecutor and the change of conflicting emotions on the face of the accused, at whose expense this prosecutor was trained.
The novel offered, obviously, all the components of the film to the public: meeting, love, a series of hardships, overcomes and even adventures, insidious plans and fateful coincidences, scouted the accuser and his benefactor on different poles of the trial. It could not be otherwise: it was hereditary, it flowed in Japanese blood from the Edo era, from the plays of Chikamatsu, permeated with Confucian ideas. The spectator is glad to be deceived every time, because the opportunity to create a full illusion of life has legitimized theatrical passions. All that was required of the director and the actors was to play and play the time-worn plot like a clean slate from a huge pile, so that the inevitability of grief was balanced by the inevitability of the beauty of this grief. Enter the next flower in the garden gallery, telling a believable tale about it. The literary basis made it possible to create living characters, main and secondary, especially since echoes of the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were so subtly interwoven into it. Heroes came to life, good and bad, but somehow lined up in a dance around Shiroito’s money. And only she herself is placed in a world of other dimensions - a world of dreams and foundations that are not bought, and the cherries in her hands, sparkling, seem to be the currency of her world.
Like Midas, who turned everything by touch into gold, the heroine made invaluable what she saw, what her dream touched. It is, however, a view that goes from soul to nature, and not from nature to soul, which immediately responds with an inaudible three-verse: what is true? Critics speak of the film’s extraordinary visual luxury. Perhaps the perception is influenced by the fact that the film is a rarity, that many of the early author’s creations died, and this one fades, slips away, so that sometimes you see it as if because of sun-drenched glass? Everything disappearing is beautiful... Future “unwinding” space along the length and nooks is still a little, but they are already spectacular: at the very beginning, the camera plays hide-and-seek with the heroine. Landscapes alternate with genre scenes, and sometimes you do not understand whether this is a full-scale shooting, and whether there are really houses on the horizon, or a painted ass, or a game of illusion. The camera is impatient, trembling, trembling; it seems as if it is in a hurry to have time to breathe, to grab all the movement of the world until it closes its eyes with the heroes together. Sometimes it soars sharply upwards, as if it were a bird on a tree, and the branches hang like clusters of characters on the credits. I loved you very much, for some reason non-Japanese lines come to mind, and it is true that love will become inaccessibly high. Sometimes the camera bends so that the world sways diagonally. Sometimes she freezes for a while, as if amazed by what she saw, and that’s when a landscape or portrait, often a heroine, is embodied – a classic ukiyo-e engraving. Is it necessary to separate the soul and the picture? Probably not, because man is also nature. No wonder there are almost no frames of pure immobility: it is violated by the circle of the horse-drawn carriage, then the flowing horizontal of the train, then the sliding of the boat. And the heroine is traditionally compared with a flower.
Shiraito, the center and engine of the picture, is not a chrysanthemum resistant to the cold of winter, not a bright rose equipped with thorns, it is a peony, a symbol of joy, love and marriage. Peony is bright, hot, generous. Peony is beautiful not in the bud, but in its heyday, in its maturity. But the peony age is short - the wind, and the petals are already crumbled. The peony dies itself or is cut off, the moth dies because it is deprived not so much of food as of support for its wings. It seems that the fault of all disasters is not social inequality, not the plight of a touring artist dependent on the season, not a spider-interester, but namely winter, winter like cold, killing the living. But, strangely, the drama film doesn't leave behind a taste of sadness; it's bright. An aristocratic by birth, Irie Takako as an artist is flawless and graceful. The future prima Kaidan Eiga, she seems to have been a magician in some ways. Her heroine, cocky and naive, trusting and daring, vulnerable and courageous, all the time, even on trial, is surrounded by an aura of sympathy, and in the long-term memory remains not her pain, but her smile. The film is fascinating precisely because you know about it: it will never be completely clear to you, the composition of blood is different. The film has to listen carefully, trusting the impression, trusting, rather, artistic flair, trusting the preserved simplicity of the heart, all this together. But let him know how to replenish the piggy bank of incorruptible treasures. So the old thing from the box is not wearable, because it is unfashionable and erased, but the concentration of time and memory burns the hand.
