Sunday, August 30, 2015

Thirst for Love (1967) - ES 28

I don't care if I'm punished. In fact, that's what I want.

Thirst for Love is one of a very small number of Eclipse Series films that I have not yet reviewed for either my Journey Through the Eclipse Series column or my Eclipse Viewer podcast, both hosted over on CriterionCast.com. I just got finished watching it this afternoon, and what an experience that was. I've been a big fan of Eclipse Series 28: The Warped World of Koreyoshi Kurahara practically since it was first released in 2011, and revisiting this film again for the first time since soon after I obtained the set reaffirmed my opinion that, from a purely cinematic angle, it's one of the most impressive volumes in that entire line of DVDs. Yes, there are volumes that probably surpass it in terms of historical importance (the Bergman, Ozu and Kurosawa releases in particular are all quite significant in that regard) but I'm hard pressed to come up with more than a few that come close to rivaling this collection for the sheer number of amazing moments of flabbergasted astonishment that I found in this collection of five movies from the 1960s.


So I've already written about the other four titles in the box (Intimidation, The Warped Ones, I Hate but Love and Black River) over on that other site, but this is my first crack at an essay about Thirst for Love. My inclination today is to keep my mouth shut about the major plot developments, because this is a film that succeeds in the delivery of jolting surprises in rapid succession, both visually and in its exploration of a beautiful young widow's frustrating search for sensual and relational fulfillment. The woman at the center of the story is Etsuko. She lost her husband some years prior to the beginning of the film's action and has dutifully chosen to remain loyal to her late husband's family, living on the expansive rural estate that she shares with her father-in-law, his surviving son and his wife (a childless couple) and his daughter, now divorced but with a couple of kids in tow. The property also provides residence to a few servants.


Etsuko's fidelity to the family she's married into has taken on a suitably "warped" character, as she's succumbed to seductive pressures placed upon her by her father-in-law. Though she demonstrates some pleasurable degree of carnal relief from his attention, it's clearly not a source of enduring satisfaction, and yet the peculiar limits imposed by the situation don't offer up too many options. Supposedly there are other men who would gladly propose marriage, but she never gives them serious consideration within the context of the film. The only alternative she pursues is a fling with the boyish servant Saburo, a lanky, energetic but immature youth upon whom Etsuko fixates throughout the length of the film. Given Etsuko's practically flawless, idealized beauty, Saburo's bewildered naivete, and the father-in-law's creepy delusions regarding the legitimacy of his emotional grip on his dead son's wife, the erotic triangle at the heart of Thirst for Love is one of the most bizarre I've witnessed in my recent exploration of Criterion films. It's probably best for me to just set that brief summary out there as an invitation of sorts, without providing much in the way of further detail for those who might be inclined to read along with me here before actually watching the movie.


But I can definitely say more about two of the marvelous attributes of the film without revealing crucial plot points. For starters, Kurahara's spectacular fluency with camera angles, editing and production design approaches sublime mastery here. After bowling over viewers with his audacious, almost reckless swoops, pans and tracking shots in his earlier films, Kurahara's direction of cinematographer Yoshio Mamiya is a bit more restrained and elegant overall, as befits the story. But when he does break out the flourishes, as is the case with an early sequence involving footage taken from a helicopter as the aging patriarch surveys his property, which then seamlessly transitions to a similarly kinetic overhead shot of the family seated at dinner, the effect is quite breathtaking and unforgettable. Kurahara also tosses in a few strategically effective bursts of color later in the otherwise monochromatic film, and makes startling use of slow-motion, freeze-frame, negative images, montage, flashbacks and other wildly unconventional angles, all of which prove integral to the story rather than what might otherwise be regarded as merely indulgent gimmicks that disrupt our engagement with Etsuko's dilemma.


The other marvel to be found in Thirst for Love is the performance of Ruriko Asaoka, who only appears in two Criterion titles, but was a major Japanese star of her era. She was the female lead in Kurahara's 1962 road comedy I Hate but Love, displaying an appeal somewhere in the range of late-teenybopper to youngish-cheesecake as far as sex appeal is concerned, and as such, did quite a fine job sharing the spotlight with Japanese teen hearthrob Yujiro Ishihara. Here though, five years later, she has matured into a darker and more complex beauty than the fairly lightweight comic role of the earlier film could allow. Asaoka's presence effortlessly propels the other actors in this film, and that's a good thing. Her powerful center of gravity is absolutely critical to the success of the movie, as she's required to simultaneously win our sympathy as a woman tormented by confusion and unfulfilled desires, even as she shows herself to be more repellent to all the virtues we typically admire in beautiful women, obsessively determined to get what she wants and oblivious to the emotional whirlwinds stirring all the weak-willed people around her.


Thirst for Love is based on an early novel of Yukio Mishima, the celebrated and controversial author whose only directorial effort, the short film Patriotism, prefigured in some ways his own death by suicide a couple years after this film was released. (It was also Kurahara's last effort for Nikkatsu Studios, since he quit working for them after encountering some friction from the bosses for his supposed artistic excesses.) Other than the short story included in Criterion's DVD edition of Patriotism, I haven't read any of Mishima's literary output, but he does seem to have been highly focused on stories where the central characters behave in ways contrary to what seems like their obvious self-interest, based on their stern sense of obligation to perform particular duties incumbent upon them due to their social class and the perceived requirements of honor. In Patriotism, the soldier's bond of allegiance to his insurgent allies compelled him to commit seppuku rather than take advantage of the cover of innocence that they had provided him by refusing to include him in their conspiracy. In Thirst for Love, Etsuko's adherence to traditional expectations that young widows would subsume their personal happiness for the sake of their late husband's family needs proves to be a fateful entrapment. As far as I can tell, Mishima excelled at sketching the horns of such dilemmas, and portrayed the agony that they provoked in the lives of participants with excruciatingly precise detail. He certainly knew about that of which he wrote, but as his own life demonstrated, he didn't seem to be aware of any way out. Likewise, Thirst for Love concludes in a rather nightmarish scenario, leaving us hanging as to how, or if, the thorny knot of problems that Etsuko got herself into was ever resolved. My hunch is that her thirst was never satisfied, and perhaps it was always unquenchable.




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