*Memories of Matsuko is part of East Winds: A Third Window Film Festival. This review has been produced for CUEAFS and is published on iCov here
Alternative title: Kiraware Matsuko no issho Written and directed by: Tetsuya Nakashima Starring: Miki Nakatani, Eita and Yusuke Iseya
A visually and cinematographically captivating enchanted world of music and joy, love, pain and fundamental values is what Tetsuya Nakashima delivers to the viewer with his 'Memories of Matsuko'. The 'Kamikaze Girls' director takes 'Amelie' a step further and his magic exceeds even the screen splendour of 'Avatar', while the combination of drama and comedy fascinates the audience and turns them into a dedicated fan of this tragically everlasting hopeless hopefulness.
Narrated through the eyes of young Shou, entangled in his late aunt's garbage, trying to put together the pieces of her life, the film is a touching tale about Matsuko and her undying faith in the good of people. Matsuko's quest for happy endings is born through her desperate efforts to receive attention and affection from her father, who rarely spares a smile for her in his care for her chronically ill sister Kumi. Tainted with the burden of her pointless attempts to receive a manifestation of love, which inevitably contaminates all her relationships with men, Matsuko goes on a quest to find an ultimate meaning, and despite her downfalls, to learn to pick the pieces and turn them into beautiful songs that become her life-support machine.
Director Nakashima, who has proven his visual brilliance with his previous 'Kamikaze Girls' and 'Paco and the Magical Book', creates yet another simply absurd, imaginative and unreal fabulous world. The different periods of Matsuko's life follow their own colour scale and paint the screen with everything from warm bright pink under the joyful sounds of optimistic songs to the dark and depressing notes with splashes of crimson blood. From the beginning to the end, the audience is thrown into a surreal mixture of colours and sounds, set as a background to a very real and tangible drama and plausible life experience, which is where the actual sadness of the film lies.
From her desire to be a perfect daughter and sibling, perfect girlfriend, wife and bar hostess, to being a perfect prostitute, Yakuza girl or prisoner, Matsuko's failures build one atop the other and Nakashima depicts a heart-twisting journey that is beautiful and tearful at the same time. Her character's drama lies in her utmost desire to find stability and success and the almost tangible emptiness of the search for happiness taints her existence. Matsuko's tragedy is evident in her inability to accept her fate and in her dedication to finding the impossible perfect happiness with utmost efforts, and set on the downward spiral of her life, she becomes victim of the attempt to unlock the undecipherable secrets of life, love and the meaning of it all.
Miki Nakatani is simply brilliant in portraying the fragile human being desperate to fit in a world of porn stars, pop and Yakuza gang members and to find a path to happiness. Her portrayal of a hopelessly hopeful romantic whose attempts at perfection break so easily and leave her life fractured and bruised, only to ignite her dedication even more, is simply flawless. Nakatani's transformation into the dispirited broken girl whose heart still holds the painful particles of a hope long lost, is the final drop of true emotion that is delivered to the audience to turn this beautiful magical world of Nakashima's into a tragedy about the fundamental existential truths. Combined with the heart-melting score by Italian composer Gabriele Roberto, Memories of Matsuko turns into a refined visual and musical masterpiece with a meaningful tragicomic beautiful story underneath; a film that leaves a long-lasting aftertaste in one's mind, having touched the boundaries of human emotion.
