The theme is a Yasujiro Ozu favorite, or perhaps one should say a Japanese favorite, the passage from feudal tradition to postwar Westernization. (It is set in the Kyoto/Osaka region just before the Second World War, so right away it is clouded with a sense of perishability.) The sisters of the title are four — two already married, two not yet — and the interplay of thoughts and emotions among and around them is wonderful to watch — even more subtle and complex (and this is saying something) than the interplay of color and light (sedately Vermeerian indoors; deliriously Fragonardian outdoors), as dense and minutely observed as a Henry James novel. Kon Ichikawa, directing at almost seventy years of age in such a way as to make other directors appear to be lying down on the job, employs a wealth of illuminating closeups, not just of revelatory faces, but of inanimate objects too (sometimes framed so tightly as to become mere abstract surfaces), and always with a daunting sense that this wealth of detail is only loose change, that it has been scrounged up along a path leading to untold riches. Throughout, there is a portentous (to use a pet Jamesian term) sense of the unexpressed and even inexpressible. But Ichikawa, partisan to none and attentive to all, even down to the lowliest servant, allows us to see clearly enough both what is precious and what is preposterous in the feudal ideal, to see how it could have lasted so long as well as how it could not last forever. And it is the note of elegiac celebration, rather than that of analytical irony, that predominates, with a big boost from a musical motif by Georg Friedrich Handel. Keiko Kishi, Yoshiko Sakuma, Sayuri Yoshinaga, Yuko Kotegawa. (1983) — Duncan Shepherd
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